Very Computer

I have two dual processor AMD systems, one a dual Opteron with an
MSI 9131 motherboard, and the other a dual MP with Tyan S2469UGN
motherboard.

Both started life with two U320 SCSI disks and both had Red Hat 9 loaded
on them. With both, I have wanted to add a large IDE disk for backup
storage (Seagate ST3200822A disks). The process I followed (not
necessarily optimal, nor straightforward, but it does show all the
hardware is working) was to:

   1. shut down computer and install hard disk
   2. boot computer and set BIOS booting to see IDE disk first
   3. install RHL9 in one big partition on IDE disk
   4. boot RHL9 from IDE disk and see that it works
   5. reboot computer and reset BIOS to boot from sda
   6. boot RHL9 from sda
   7. mount IDE disk to /home/IDE

The Opteron system did this without problems. The MP system, however,
isn't working right. I can make it all the way through step 6 without
problems, but step 7 eludes me.

When first booted off sda, when I try to mount the IDE disk I get:

   [root home]# mount /dev/hda1 IDE
   mount: /dev/hda1: can't read superblock

When I try hdparm, I get:

   [root root]# hdparm -tT /dev/hda
   /dev/hda: Input/output error

I booted the MP system off hda and found that
cat /proc/ide/ide0/hda/driver gives "ide-disk version 1.17".

However, when I boot the MP system off sda and execute it, I get a
different result:

   [root root]# cat /proc/ide/ide0/hda/driver
   ide-default version 0.9.newide

This seemed rather odd, so I executed

   [root root]# echo "ide-disk version 1.17" > /proc/ide/ide0/hda/driver

Now executing hdparm:

   [root root]# hdparm -tT /dev/hda

   /dev/hda:
    Timing buffer-cache reads:  128 MB in  0.46 seconds =278.26 MB/sec
    Timing buffered disk reads:  64 MB in  1.04 seconds = 61.54 MB/sec

which is what I expect.

I still cannot mount it, however:

   [root home]# mount -t ext3 /dev/hda1 IDE
   mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/hda1,
          or too many mounted file systems
          (could this be the IDE device where you in fact use
          ide-scsi so that sr0 or sda or so is needed?)

Using sfdisk to list it gives,

   [root root]# sfdisk -l /dev/hda

   Disk /dev/hda: 133674 cylinders, 255 heads, 63 sectors/track
   Units = cylinders of 8225280 bytes, blocks of 1024 bytes, counting
                                                               from 0

      Device Boot Start     End   #cyls    #blocks   Id  System
   /dev/hda1   *      0+  24320   24321- 195358401   83  Linux
   /dev/hda2          0       -       0          0    0  Empty
   /dev/hda3          0       -       0          0    0  Empty
   /dev/hda4          0       -       0          0    0  Empty

Does anyone have any idea what's going on?

The exact same procedure works flawlessly with the same type SCSI and
IDE disks on the Opteron system and I can boot off the IDE disk on the
MP system. When I boot the MP off the SCSI disks the IDE disk's driver
is different and I can't mount it, even if I change the IDE disk's
driver to what's used when the system is booted off it.

Thanks,

Craig

[...]

Quote:

> However, when I boot the MP system off sda and execute it, I get a
> different result:

>    [root root]# cat /proc/ide/ide0/hda/driver
>    ide-default version 0.9.newide

[...]
Well, that seems to be the ide-floppy driver and not the ide-disk
driver. This might explain the oddities, you are seeing later.

Unfortunately, I can only guess, why is does try to use ide-floppy on
the harddisk. Mightbe some quirk in the BIOS of the MP board with
harddisks >120 GB, which causes wrong configuration information passed
to the kernel.  

What happens if you remove ide-floppy support from your kernel ?