by I have a Dell Dimension XPS D300 with a built-in ATAPI zip drive, and
have encountered two problems with it:
1. Occasionally (maybe once in 20 times), the drive will refuse to
eject the disk. The disk is not mounted (according to "mount"), but
pushing the eject button apparently does nothing. Actually the disk
does get ejected - after exactly 15 minutes! The only way I have
found to eject it sooner is to reboot the operating system (shutdown
-r now).
Glancing through the sources (drivers/block/ide-floppy.c), I note that
IDEFLOPPY_MAX_PC_RETRIES^2*IDEFLOPPY_WAIT_CMD = 3*3*100 sec = 15 min.
2. Somewhat more often (maybe once for every 10 MB transferred), I get
an error message like this written to the console:
hdd: irq timeout: status=0x80 { Busy }
hdd: ATAPI reset complete
ide-floppy: hdd: I/O error, pc = 2a, key = 6, asc = 28, ascq = 0
end_request: I/O error, dev 16:41, sector 44196
There is a 45 sec delay before the first two lines, and another 45 sec
delay before the last two lines.
I recompiled the driver with these settings:
/*
* The following are used to debug the driver.
*/
#define IDEFLOPPY_DEBUG_LOG 1
#define IDEFLOPPY_DEBUG_INFO 1
#define IDEFLOPPY_DEBUG_BUGS 1
This generated enormous system logs, but nothing of interest at the
times of the above messages.
I am running kernel 2.1.94 (but saw the same problems with 2.0.34).
None of the more recent patches appear to affect
drivers/block/ide-floppy.c, which supports the ATAPI Zip drive. In
fact, there have been no changes in that file since Dec 97. Is anyone
maintaining it? I emailed the listed author, but got no reply.
Has anyone else seen this?
Does anyone have a solution, workaround, or even hints?
- Jim Van Zandt
p.s. I have been using a SCSI zip drive for over a year, with
absolutely no problems.
background:
uname -a
Linux vanzandt-pc 2.1.94 #3 SMP Tue Apr 14 07:45:26 EDT 1998 i686 unknown
boot messages include these:
PIIX4: IDE controller on PCI bus 00 dev 39
PIIX4: not 100% native mode: will probe irqs later
ide0: BM-DMA at 0xfc90-0xfc97, BIOS settings: hda:DMA, hdb:pio
ide1: BM-DMA at 0xfc98-0xfc9f, BIOS settings: hdc:DMA, hdd:pio
hda: Maxtor 88455D8, ATA DISK drive
hdc: NEC CD-ROM DRIVE:28B, ATAPI CDROM drive
hdd: IOMEGA ZIP 100 ATAPI, ATAPI FLOPPY drive