On 08/03/09 20:35, justin@vikingship.co.uk wrote:

Hi again,

Have played some more, and here's where I'm at :

Primary FDC (on mobo) has 1.44Mb drive connected and powered

Secondary FDC (on AHA-1542B) has 1.44Mb drive connected and powered

I boot System Rescue CD, and type the following command :

modprobe floppy "floppy=4,4,cmos"

Try adding "two_fdc" to this line (and any DMA and/or IRQ setting that you might need):

modprobe floppy "two_fdc floppy=4,4,cmos" modprobe floppy "two_fdc floppy=4,4,cmos 2,dma 6,irq" modprobe floppy "debug two_fdc floppy=4,4,cmos 2,dma 6,irq"

The two_fdc setting is needed to make the floppy driver probe for the second FDC. The CMOS setting is needed to specify the characteristics of the drive. Unfortunately, the module is not smart enough to infer existence of a second FDC from the existence of a drive numbered 4, so both options (two_fdc and 4,4,cmos) need to be given.

If you chose to use insmod, rather than modprobe, the space between the various options needs to be replaced with a TAB, as new versions of insmod apparently do their own parsing of the string before passing it to the module.

0x370 is already the default address for the second FDC, no need to specify it explicitly.

The 0x3f6 and 0x376 registers are used by the IDE controller, and the floppy module is sufficiently smart to not claim it (it claims two ranges per FDC, in order to leave this one register unclaimed. In case of 0x370, this would be 0x372-0x375 and 0x377 )

Regards,

Alain

and I get the following in /var/log/messages :

Aug 03 16:11:47 sysresccd floppy4: setting CMOS code to 4 Aug 03 16:11:47 sysresccd Floppy drive(s): fd0 is 2.88M AMI BIOS, fd4 is 1.44M Aug 03 16:11:47 sysresccd FDC 0 is a post-1991 82077

There's no mention of "FDC 1", and /dev only gets populated with device files for fd0; nothing gets created for fd4. So I type :

mknod /dev/fd4 b 2 128 chgrp floppy /dev/fd4 chmod 640 /dev/fd4

So /dev/fd4 looks as follows :

brw-r----- 1 root floppy 2, 128 2009-08-03 16:12 /dev/fd4

Then as soon as I try and access fd4; with something like :

mount /dev/fd4 /mnt/floppy

I get :

mount: /dev/fd4 is not a valid block device

It's as though the second FDC isn't getting detected. The jumper is set for 0x370, and the AHA-1542B works fine as a primary FDC (jumper set for 0x3F0)

Surely this should work ? I'd be inclined to suspect the FDC on the AHA-1542B, but it works fine as a primary FDC

One thing I did notice; I ran cat /proc/ioports | grep 37, and got the following :

0376-0376 : 0000:00:07.1 0376-0376 : pata_via 0378-037a : parport0 037b-037f : parport0

Is the pata_via blocking the secondary FDC IO port ? I notice my main PC shows something similar :

0376-0376 : 0000:00:06.0 0376-0376 : ide1 0378-037a : parport0

I'm going to try an ISA I/O card, an older PC, and maybe another Linux distro, but I really would welcome any suggestions.

TIA

Justin _______________________________________________ Fdutils mailing list Fdutils@fdutils.linux.lu https://fdutils.linux.lu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fdutils

I am coming in to the middle of this thread, but IRQs and aha-1542b does bring some bad memories back. I remember struggling to get them to work properly back in 1995. The upshot of it all is: 1542b and PCI are not compatible. I believe this was the official word from Adaptec. They then sold us AHA-2940s, which worked flawlessly (the same can't be said for the Seagate ST32550s they were connected to - those drives ran too hot and burned themselves out! ).

On Mon, 3 Aug 2009, justin@vikingship.co.uk wrote:

Hi again,

Have played some more, and here's where I'm at :

Primary FDC (on mobo) has 1.44Mb drive connected and powered

Secondary FDC (on AHA-1542B) has 1.44Mb drive connected and powered

I boot System Rescue CD, and type the following command :

modprobe floppy "floppy=4,4,cmos"

and I get the following in /var/log/messages :

Aug 03 16:11:47 sysresccd floppy4: setting CMOS code to 4 Aug 03 16:11:47 sysresccd Floppy drive(s): fd0 is 2.88M AMI BIOS, fd4 is 1.44M Aug 03 16:11:47 sysresccd FDC 0 is a post-1991 82077

There's no mention of "FDC 1", and /dev only gets populated with device files for fd0; nothing gets created for fd4. So I type :

mknod /dev/fd4 b 2 128 chgrp floppy /dev/fd4 chmod 640 /dev/fd4

So /dev/fd4 looks as follows :

brw-r----- 1 root floppy 2, 128 2009-08-03 16:12 /dev/fd4

Then as soon as I try and access fd4; with something like :

mount /dev/fd4 /mnt/floppy

I get :

mount: /dev/fd4 is not a valid block device

It's as though the second FDC isn't getting detected. The jumper is set for 0x370, and the AHA-1542B works fine as a primary FDC (jumper set for 0x3F0)

Surely this should work ? I'd be inclined to suspect the FDC on the AHA-1542B, but it works fine as a primary FDC

One thing I did notice; I ran cat /proc/ioports | grep 37, and got the following :

0376-0376 : 0000:00:07.1 0376-0376 : pata_via 0378-037a : parport0 037b-037f : parport0

Is the pata_via blocking the secondary FDC IO port ? I notice my main PC shows something similar :

0376-0376 : 0000:00:06.0 0376-0376 : ide1 0378-037a : parport0

I'm going to try an ISA I/O card, an older PC, and maybe another Linux distro, but I really would welcome any suggestions.

TIA

Justin _______________________________________________ Fdutils mailing list Fdutils@fdutils.linux.lu https://fdutils.linux.lu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fdutils