I recently purchased an Adaptec ASH-1233 pci ide controller "Ultra ATA" card, and had some trouble getting it to work properly in my computer. I have resolved the problem, so I thought I'd post the details here just in case anyone is in the same boat.
SITUATION:
I have in my computer two hard disk drives (/dev/hda & /dev/hdb), and two CD drives (/dev/scd0 (CDRW) and /dev/hdd (DVD)) connected to the motherboard IDE controller. I wanted to add a second IDE controller so that I could plug in other disk drives if needed. I went to the local, over-priced, rebate-mongering, big, yellow, technology store and bought an Adaptec ASH-1233 "Ultra ATA" card.
PROBLEM:
When I installed the card and connected some extra hard disk drives to its cables, the Fedora Core 2 Linux kernel loaded the drivers for the ide controllers in the wrong order. It loaded the Adaptec ASH-1233 driver first, thereby making the spare drives attached to it /dev/hda and /dev/hdc (they were both set as single, master devices on their respective cables). My motherboard ide controller driver was loaded next, causing my existing Linux drives to become /dev/hde and /dev/hdf and my CD drives /dev/hdg and /dev/hdh! The system would boot, but the swap and my home partition were unavailable.
SOLUTION:
After much Googling, I found that the solution is to use a kernel parameter "ide=reverse" in the /boot/grub/grub.conf file to force the kernel to load the ide controller drivers in reverse order from the way they are found on the PCI bus. (use "lspci" to see the order of your PCI devices on the bus)
So this is what I did:
0. make a backup copy of /boot/grub/grub.conf
1. edit /boot/grub/grub.conf (you must have root privileges to do this) and change the default kernel section (usually the first kernel section listed in the file)
FROM:
title Fedora Core (2.6.7-1.494.2.2)
root (hd0,0)
kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.7-1.494.2.2 ro root=LABEL=/ rhgb quiet
initrd /initrd-2.6.7-1.494.2.2.imgTO: (notice the "kernel" line is changed):
title Fedora Core (2.6.7-1.494.2.2)
root (hd0,0)
kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.7-1.494.2.2 ro ide=reverse root=LABEL=/ rhgb quiet
initrd /initrd-2.6.7-1.494.2.2.img
After this, I rebooted the computer, and everything was back to normal, and I can now connect four more drives if I need to.
Hope this helps.
-- Mitch Wiedemann mc^2 Computer Consulting mc2@xxxxxxxxxxxxx http://www.lightlink.com/mc2
