Sorry for the lateness of the response; I was away this weekend.
On Fri, 23 Jun 2000 02:54:27 -0700 (PDT) Andre Hedrick wrote:
>
> Andries,
>
> Ask Jim Miller of Castlewood ORB 2.2 about this product.
Jim Miller is the fellow who sent me the ORB EIDE manual. He also later
sent
me the source of a web about parallel port IDE stuff. I think he wants
to help; at least, he sent me a OEM document and a web page.
>
> I asked for sample product to test and certify.
> Castlewood said NO samples, thus Linux will not have support.
> The silly think is they are less than 20 miles from me.
Andre, I will be happy to loan you my device and two disks for testing,
if
it would help. Just tell me where to send it. I would like to get it
back,
though ;)
I had hoped to work on this as my first attempt at Linux hacking, but I
seem to be in over my head.
>
> Regardless if you can hook the device, until the offical position that
> Castlewood has taken to ignore Linux changes, I do not and will not
> support the product and any problems it cause in the OS.
>
> Jim (the person that purchased an ORB), I am sorry that I am forced to
> hold this position. Since it is most likely based on SFF-xxxx docs that
> are not valid not supported under the standards committee of T13 at this
> time, I worry that it will not comply with the OS that follows ATA-ATAPI.
>
If you have a minute, let me recount my experiences with this drive, and
why
I posted to Andries in the first place. (If you know about all this,
you
can stop reading now:)
The drive works fine as a fixed disk, which is how it comes configured
from
the factory, and how hdparm reports it. You can insert a disk, use
fdisk,
make a filesystem, mount/umount filesystems, eject the disk, etc. all
without
troubles. You can insert/mount/umount/eject the same disk as many times
as
you want. (All this from my non-exhaustive testing on 2.2.15 ;)
You just can't try to use a second disk :( which is the whole point of
removable drives, no? (This is why I'm willing to loan out the device
for
a while; it isn't useful to me as a fixed disk.)
<kernel newbie>
I assume that since the drive reports itself as fixed, the fixed-disk
IDE
driver is used, not the floppy IDE driver. It appears that some
information
may be cached across umount/mount cycles which confuses the driver or
mount.
In any event, one of my 2 ORB disks has an ext2 fs on partition 1, the
other
a VFAT fs on partition 5, and once I mount the ext2 disk I cannot
umount/eject it and get the other disk to mount.
</kernel newbie>
The drive ships with a disk full of Windows utilities, one of which you
evidently run to change the device to report itself as removable. Since
I
don't do Windows, I cannot verify that you can run the utility, then
reboot
under Linux and have the drive report itself as removable.
When I asked Castlewood for some documentation on the drive, I had
(naively)
assumed that you could change the fixed/removable configuration via an
ATA
command. Hence my reponse to Andries' post.
Apparently, however, this configuration is stored in some (presumably
nonvolatile) memory on the drive, and can be changed via software
(remember that Windows utility). I just couldn't learn how to do it
from
the docs Castlewood sent me.
So, there seem to be two issues: Getting a device to Andre for testing,
and learning from Castlewood how to convince the drive it has removable,
not fixed, media. I've offered to help with the first; perhaps Jim
Miller of Castlewood will see this (I've CC'ed him) and help with the
second.
To Andries:
My offer of the loan of my device extends to you also. If we can learn
how to get the device to report itself as removable, it seems you could
benefit from some testing as well.
-- Jim
>
> Andre Hedrick
> The Linux ATA/IDE guy
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Mon Jun 26 2000 - 21:00:08 EST