Re: more than 2 promise ultradma133 TX2 controllers

[Vojtech Pavlik <vojtech@suse.cz>]

On Fri, Apr 12, 2002 at 03:18:31PM +0200, Baldur Norddahl wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I noticed if I put in more than 2 promise controllers, the onboard BIOS will
> only detect disks on the first 2 controllers.
> 
> I got a system with 4 controllers. Linux detects disks on them all, but when
> it comes to the detect partitions phase it hangs with DMA timeout errors on
> those controllers that didn't get initialized or listed during BIOS boot.
> 
> The "Special UDMA Feature" option is supposed to initialize cards that the
> BIOS forgot. The help seems to indicate that this option was made for OLD
> cards, the ultradma133 TX2 is hardly old :-) Besides, it doesn't work.
> 
> I changed the configuration to be two ultradma133 and two ultradma100 cards.
> Now the BIOS screen is shown twice, one with the two newer cards and one
> with the two older cards. And linux is happy too.
> 
> I have one concern, this setup forces me to put some 160 GB disks on the
> ultradma100 card. Promise never said that card would support this, and the
> BIOS can't detect the disk correctly. Linux however seems to be fine, it
> shows the disks with their correct size and everything seems good. But is it
> safe?

Yes, it is safe. However the fact that 4 133 cards don't work should be
fixed.

UDMA133 isn't rellated to >128GB support in any way.

-- 
Vojtech Pavlik
SuSE Labs