Hardware additions to my box -- help!

[M0E-lnx]

I have ran tinto a situation that has created a bit of a problem for me, allow me to explain

My box has a SATA hd, and 2 cd/dvd devices which occupy the only IDE port in my Mobo.

I have some old IDE drives that i'd like to get some information from, so I thought... "I need a PCI-to-IDE adaptor, and an enclosure (dock) would be nice to easily swap out the old drives. So long story short, I went and purchased a PCI-to-IDE adaptor, and a drive bay, which fits into the front of the box just like a cdrom device and has a pull-out box where you connect the old drive, you put it back in and you're supposed to be in business. But here is where the problems begin.


First and foremost.
My box will not boot if the PCI-to-IDE card is present. I've tried over and over and over... I dont even get to the LILO screen it just stalls before trying read any MBR.
This has forced me to eliminate the posibility of having additional IDE ports, and use the ingle IDE port in the MOBO for the drive bay and one of the cd/dvd devices. The system does boot in this configuration, however, both devices are seen as /dev/hdb here

probedisk returns
/dev/sda (the sata internal drive)
/dev/sdb | CD-ROM | (the cd/dvd writer)
/dev/sdb | Quantum Fireball | (old hard drive in the drive bay)

Has anyone ever tried to do anything similar to this?
Any ideas how to fix this thing?

[newt]

I'm sure you've already tried a lot of things, and probably what I'm going to suggest.  But, in case you haven't, is it possible that a jumper adjustment on the cdrom could help?  Maybe try moving the cdrom to 'slave' position so that the drive bay can occupy the master position.

[bigpaws]

Sounds like a newer MB. Have you looked at PATA settings in the
Bios?

Have you tried moving the ide cdrom to the pci-ide converter?


How about a kernel recompile for the specific converter?

Just some thoughts I had.

Bigpaws

[M0E-lnx]

thanks for your replies...
I have wandered about, however not yet tried the jumper suggestion... WIll give that a try

@ bigpaws
I can't try anything on the pci-ide converter because the box will simply not boot when the card is present. So the kernel recompile option is also thrown out here.
Have not cheked to see if the BIOS has any PATA settings at all

[toothandnail]

For something like that (which I take it would be temporary), I would probably buy a USB enclosure, drop the old drive into it and use it that way. Certainly what I do with my laptop and old drives....

The only problem, of course, is that you would need to spend some more money to purchase a USB enclosure for the drive.

paul.

[M0E-lnx]

At this point, I'm considering returning the IDE PCI card to get one of those USB things... but I'm afraid they wont take them back because they've been installed already
I'll have to give it another shot

[M0E-lnx]

After some more trials, my box finally booted with the PCI card present (on a different slot than the one tried before). However, the drive attached tho the PCI-IDE card was no where to be seen in the system... I guess those things require windows drivers to function... dunno..
The weird thing is that lspci showed the hardware present, and apparently recognized and all... but still no joy accessing the data in the drives.

I decided to return this stuff, so I did. Instead of that, I bought me a IDE-to-SATA converted.
This gave me no problem at all.
I hooked up 3 smaller (4-10gb) drives and sucked all the juice out of them and placed it in my big sata drive in no time.
Part of the reason for buying such an adaptor was to continue using a 40gb IDE drive I have, so when I was done cleaning out the old drives, permanently mounted the 40gb drive in the box, hooked the converter to it's back, and voi-la!.



There are some side effects to this though..
I noticed my box boots significantly slower than it did b efore... not sure why or how to find out.
Not sure if this has anything to do with the above problem but
My devices are still not labeled correctly

/dev/sda|Direct-Access|ATA      WDC WD2500KS-00M
/dev/sdb|Direct-Access|ATA      ST340014A
/dev/sdc|Direct-Access|
/dev/sdd|Direct-Access|LEXAR    JUMPDRIVE

sda is a 250gb SATA Drive
sdb is a 40gb IDE drive (converted to SATA)
sdd is a 128 pendrive
Notice it's not listing any cdrom devices, and I dont know what sdc is...

I'm also unable to boot from cdrom (BIOS settings are set to allow such a boot)
Both of my cdrom devices are connected on the single IDE port on the MOBO using Cable Select jumper settings (which have always worked for me in the past)

[Masta]

Have you attempted to edit your fstab and make sure things are straight there?
 Also might want to look into your mtab (although that mtab not be part of the issue).