Re: ATAPI + cdwriter problem

[jbradford@dial.pipex.com]

Hi,

> the other 2 drives are on a different controller not a prmoise its running
> off the motherboard.

Odd, I was positive you were going to say it was the Promise controller to blame :-)

> its a via chipset motherboard which botht the old 2x writer and 44x are on
> the secondary channel
> the whole ide system looks a bit like this.
> hda: IBM-DTTA-351680, ATA DISK drive
> hdb: IBM-DTLA-305040, ATA DISK drive
> hdc: HP CD-Writer+ 7200, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM drive
> hdd: IDE/ATAPI CD-ROM 44X, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM drive
> hde: Maxtor 4G160J8, ATA DISK drive
> hdf: Maxtor 4G160J8, ATA DISK drive
> hdg: 32X10, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM drive

Can't see anything obviously wrong with that setup, but once you get the new CD-writer working, I'd re-arrange things like this:

hda: IBM-DTTA-351680, ATA DISK drive
hdb: IBM-DTLA-305040, ATA DISK drive
hdc: 32X10, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM drive
hdd: IDE/ATAPI CD-ROM 44X, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM drive
hde: Maxtor 4G160J8, ATA DISK drive
hdf: Maxtor 4G160J8, ATA DISK drive
not connected: HP CD-Writer+ 7200, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM drive

Unless you really need 2 CD-Writers available, (in which case, I would suggest moving over to SCSI anyway).

Then you are only using 3 interfaces, and not 4, (which seems 'neater' to me, but you might dis-agree).  I don't think you're likely to see much performace advantage to having the CD-writer on the Promise card, to be honest.  You probably will for the Maxtor, (good choice), hard drives, though.

> i have some time over the next few days so i could try to recreate crash
> and try stuff.

That might help, as I can't think of anything else to suggest off hand.

John.