Very Computer

by **Keith Bobit** » Sun, 19 Feb 1995 03:22:04

I have read plenty of posts on NEC260's but I haven't seen
this error reported before. My NEC-260R is in a Gateway P5-90. The
machine has two 1G WDC drives on the EIDE interface and the cdrom
alone on the ISA IDE interface. Linux is on the second WDC drive
with / in hdb2, swap in hdb3, and /usr in hdb4. I use version 1.1.92
of the kernel. The kernel doesn't seem to recognize the cdrom or the
ISA IDE interface at boot time. It finds the EIDE interface at
IRQ14 but not ISA interface at IRQ15. When I try to mount the cdrom
on /dev/nec260 (major 26 minor 0) or /dev/hdc (major 22 minor 0),
I get the following error message:

mount: /dev/hdc (or whatever) is not a block device

Both /dev/nec260 and /dev/hdc are block devices; their permissions
start with a 'b'. I have deleted and remade the device files with
the mknod command and have run the "MAKEDEV..etc.." script in
/usr/src/linux/drivers/block that is referenced in the ide.c and
ide-cd.c source files. I have also played with the #defines in
ide.c to no avail. I have tried /dev/hdc[0-16] for a device file and
all fail in the same way.

Thanks in advance.

-------------------------------------------------------------
Keith Bobitt Ph. 919-941-5740x4125

Wandel & Goltermann Technologies RTP, NC
-------------------------------------------------------------

by **SNY..** » Mon, 20 Feb 1995 05:08:09

... The kernel doesn't seem to recognize the cdrom or the
ISA IDE interface at boot time.
...
mount: /dev/hdc (or whatever) is not a block device

Means that whatever device number that is is not known to the kernel.
(All the entries in /dev do is map names to device numbers; the kernel
only knows about device numbers.)

If you don't see a message about the drive when booting, then the kernel
doesn't know about the device. Try hdc=cdrom (or whatever) as explained
in README.ide.

Both /dev/nec260 ...

If you have 1.1.92, don't even bother with this. In fact, delete it;
it's obsolete.

sss

by **Keith Bobit** » Wed, 22 Feb 1995 07:52:29

> ... The kernel doesn't seem to recognize the cdrom or the
> ISA IDE interface at boot time.
> ...

My problem was solved by adding the string hdd=cdrom to my loadlinX
boot program command line. I tried hdc=cdrom and saw that the kernel
was finding the cdrom on hdd not hdc even though the two hard drives
are on hda and hdb. I have not opened the machine case to check
jumpers on the cdrom but for now things are working quite well.
The X Window System with the Mach64 server and the SLIP connection
to my provider using 'dip' is all working great. Also defining
REALLY_FAST_IO to 1 in ide.c can speed things up a bit.

Hope this helps someone and thanks to all who responded.

KB

Very Computer

NEC-260R; Can't mount - 'not a block device' error

NEC-260R; Can't mount - 'not a block device' error

NEC-260R; Can't mount - 'not a block device' error

NEC-260R; Can't mount - 'not a block device' error