6500 install hell

[Nathan A. McQuillen]

Yeah, I thought ATA was pretty backwards compatible from my Intel Linux
experiences, but you never know what Apple's Expedient Shortcuts Division
came up with in those lean and hungry days...

Anyway, there's been one further development, which I offer primarily for
the benefit of future archive searchers in this situation. This falls
under the 'things you didn't really expect would actually work anyway'
category but is still interesting to me -- I have an Achip-based ATA/66
PCI card (Is it the Sonnet? Tempo? No recuerdo) which I tried installing
in the 6500. Still got errors with BootX at startup (it's settled into a
regular pattern of "Unimplemented Trap"s now), but after shift-boot-open
CP-click 'Linux', the kernel likes the Achip card, finds the drive and
puts it at hde. I can see the drive but it still fails to partition.
Hypothesis: this will not work. Proven to my satisfaction.

Later: I returned the 4GB OEM drive to the builtin ATA, pulled the Achip
card, and can partition but formatting hangs. (What's really running
here, behind all the Python? parted and mkfs?)

I should know this, but is there a rescue image someplace that would allow
me to boot, give me pdisk/mkfs, and not exceed that 32MB ceiling? It seems
logical that there should be... I might also, if I keep the machine, just
do the install from a different system, pop the drive in, and run with
it. This process has yet to fall out of fun/frustration equilibrium, but
it's gettin' there.

The part that confuses the hell out of me (because I *actually do not
understand Linux to save my life and am only a trained monkey*) is why the
whole installer dies post haste if I switch consoles and run ps.

Thanks again, all.

- Nathan


On Wed, 26 Jun 2002, Timothy A. Seufert wrote:

> At 1:48 AM -0400 6/26/02, Rich Dolinsky wrote:
>
> >>  5. OK. At this point, I begin suspecting hardware. I swap out the WD drive
> >>  for a 30GB Maxtor, pull the internal SCSI devices, add my trusty
> >>  Matsushita external CD-R, and boot again.
> >
> >Not sure if this was at all I good idea.  ATA interface on that machine is
> >only 33MHZ rated.  Putting an ata 100 drive would not be a good idea...check
> >that.
>
> The ATA interface on that machine isn't 33 MHz, not by a long shot.
> More like ~8.3 MHz in DMA mode.  (That translates to 16.6 MB/s
> throughput since ATA is 2 bytes wide.  I forget the proper name for
> that mode -- DMA mode 2 or something like that.)
>
> Most UDMA (33 MB/s) and above (ATA66, ATA100, ATA133) drives should
> be backwards compatible enough to work in the 6500.  A quick look at
> the www.xlr8yourmac.com drive compatability database shows that
> people are running very modern drives such as the Seagate Barracuda
> ATA IV in the 6500 with no problems.
>