Tekram DC series IDE card
jdu...@ridgecrest.ca.us
IDE card with Linux? This card uses a hardware cache and a track remapping
scheme that preceeds EIDE; you set the motherboard BIOS to drive type 1 and
let the card do the rest. It came with drivers for Windows 3.1, NT, OS/2 2.1, Warp,
and a half dozen flavors of commercial UNIX, but no LINUX.
It has been a great card, accepting every drive I ever hooked to it and running
DOS, Windows, and Warp without a hitch. (it has also been a great place to
put my old 30 pin SIMMS :) Anybody have any experiences to share before
I try to feed it to LINUX?
Mac A. Cody
If its any help, I just recently installed a Conner 1.275 GB EIDE and a
TekRam DC-280 VL-BUS non-cacheing E/IDE controller-I/O combo card. My
guess is that the electronics are probably similar. I had no real problems,
beyond the initial trepedations with the confusing warning messages with the
Linux fdisk (see README.ide in the kernel subdirectory). This was a virgin
drive with nothing installed on it. I used InfoMagic's Slackware 2.3 on a
486DX 33 MHz, 8 MB system. I (generously ;^) ) set up a 400 MB partition
for DOS/MS Window and gave the rest (gladly) to various Linux partitions.
My concern about your setup is that you seem to indicate that you have used
the software provided with the TekRam board to allow it to access the full
hard drive (true?). I'm not sure what the software may have done to your
drive which may make it incompatible with all but the most recent Linux kernels.
I didn't use the software myself since 400 MB is all that I'll let DOS/MS
Windows to see of my hard disk! I guess my summary is that the TekRam boards
do work with Linux but, you should proceed with caution. Good luck and enjoy
discovering Linux. I sure have!
Best regards,
Mac A. Cody <mc...@dfw.net>
Kevin Burtch
>In article <DG367...@ridgecrest.ca.us>, jdu...@ridgecrest.ca.us says:
>>
>>Has anybody had any experience with running a Tekram DC-680 VESA
>>IDE card with Linux? This card uses a hardware cache and a track remapping
I use the DC-680C with my Linux system... it works great with or without
track remapping. (Linux uses it either way)
The only thing that does NOT work, is the 3rd and 4th drives... unless
you "chain" or "link" them... I have 2 340M drives, but the system thinks
they are one 680M drive... the other channel has one 1080M drive.
...oh, and it works at 50MHz fine. 8^)
Later,
Kevin
--
"Any resemblance to persons, living, dead, or undead, is purely coincidental"
"Lycanthrope Productions Ltd."
- in trailing credits of "An American Werewolf in London".
Kevin Burtch - Keeper of Scorpions.
jdu...@ridgecrest.ca.us
>In article <DG367...@ridgecrest.ca.us>, jdu...@ridgecrest.ca.us says:
>>
>>Has anybody had any experience with running a Tekram DC-680 VESA
>>IDE card with Linux?
>
>the software provided with the TekRam board to allow it to access the full
>hard drive (true?).
False. I am currently running a 730 Mb WD and a 1.2 Gb Conner on the card.
In both cases you connect em, then set the CMOS type to drive 1. The first
time you turn the machine on with a new drive, you are placed in the setup
menu and asked to confirm if the card got the drive parameters right. It then
tells you what it is re-mapping the drives as, and away you go. No software
is required for this. Win 3.1 and OS/2 both work without a software driver,
but without 32 bit access.
I loaded LINUX last week, and after I quit trying to feed it the actual HD
parameters and just went with the (wrong) LINUX fdisk parameters, it went
just fine. I still cann't get it booting from bootmaster, but I think that is
another story...
Jason Lockwood
Well I have had 2 tekram cards now both running fine under linux
with 1 WD 540 1024/16/63 1 Conner cfs540 1050/16/63
and a conner 1.2 gig 2477/16/63 using track sector remap only for
1.2 gig drive giving 619/64/63 as it has dos on it as well.
linux is on the first half of the 540 below 1024 cylinders as lilo
like it much better there
and the 700 odd meg on the last half of the 1.2 gig is my home partition
I have had no drive problems / data corruption etc at all
I had a dc-680c bios rev 2.00 that suports 4 drives
I now have a dc-680cd that supports 4 drives and 2 ide cdroms
note: the cdrom bus can support ide hdds under linux as it sees them
but dos doesn't. Now all thats needed is support for the second two drives
on the main ide bus.
Also the cdrom bus is not cached so drives work just like standard eide
I have yet to try both boards at once. mainly because doing this
requires the loss of the cdrom bus and irq 15 to the second board.
But It should then allow the first 2 drives of each controller to be
seen from linux.
--
Jason Lockwood CQ-Pan System Administrator
email : ja...@cq-pan.cqu.edu.au Bachelor of Computing Degree
Central Queensland University.
Member: Systems Administrators Guild of Australia
WWW <http://cq-pan.cqu.edu.au/cq-pan/jason-lockwood/jason-lockwood.html>