On Wed  1 Oct 97 (12:54:07 +0100), awg@art.co.uk wrote:
>On Wed, 1 Oct 1997, A.S.MCGough wrote:

<snip>
>It may be that the drives shipped by Acorn have the botch internally
>(assuming that's how they work) - having the board in place but
>unplugging the drive still doesn't allow RiscBSD to work for me.
>
>> As an experiment tonight I replaced the CDROM (temporarily) with a 
>> pioneer 24 speed atapi cdrom drive. RiscBSD booted without any
>problem. 
>> So it definatly seems to be a quirk of the kernel code not
>recognising 
>> some imperfection in the cdrom's driver.
>
>*Nod* - that confirms my diagnosis with another atapi. But I should
>stress that it also seems to be specific to having a Maxtor drive as
>the master - Connor and Quantum drives have been seen to work fine.
>Can you try putting your old drive back in and booting a kernel? You
>don't actually need to do anything to the drive itself, so you could
>load an installation kernel as shipped; if it gets as far as asking
>you about partitioning the drive, it will have got past the CD probe.

I'm not too sure whether this is specific to Maxtor.
I've got one of the original Cumana CD's with the I/F board and a
Quantum Fireball 3.2GB. I can only get RiscBSD to boot (ie find the HD)
if I disconnect the interface from the IDE chain.

RiscOS also takes a while to boot if the CD is connected (it just sits there
for around 30 seconds before I get any HD activity), but it does work.
I think its probably down to some strange semi incompatibility between
the HD and CD. I'll have to borrow a proper ATAPI CD to see if that will solve
the problem.

--
Rob Leadbeater