Re: Re: 2.4.9 to 2.4.14 bug & workaround

Re: Re: 2.4.9 to 2.4.14 bug & workaround

[joeja]

If it were just a case of mount complainig about partitions or something I could live with that, but it is not.  

If the partition is bad it should not mount it.  Plain and simple and it should compain. The fact is that it does mount it.  

If it was really mounted read only, cp should fail, rather than trying to cp to the drive and complain 'could not copy'.  

If I do a kill -9 on the process ID of cp, cp should die.  It does not.  EVER.  Instead the console starts to fill up with messages about hdd.  I'll see if I can get the exact message.

If I try to shut down the system it does not.  It kills all processes except for the zip drive, then I see the console fill and scroll (super fast) with hdd messages.

So who is the maintainer of the ide-floppy as that is what I am using.  

Joe 

(reformatted quote to heed line length provisions)
> I have an internal iomega 'type' (not iomega) IDE zip drive.  It
> mounts as /dev/hdd instead of /dev/hdd4.  Mounting as /dev/hdd seems
> okay.
> 
> Mounting as /dev/hdd4 will hang my kernel( 2.4.9-2.4.14).  I have read
> that on some MB you can change the bios to none for the ide device and
> this works on certain mb.  I tried this and it did not change
> anything.

Well, all this depends on how the media has been formatted. From what I
heard (I have no exchangable drives since I sold my SyQuest crap), some
ZIP (presumably) media are partitioned and have their fourth partition
formatted, giving your data as /dev/hdd4 or /dev/sdb4 or something other
with 4 to the end. Then, the entire media might be formatted "raw" with
Linux, so you'd have to mount /dev/hdd instead.

The BIOS is only involved for booting and come APM or ACPI (power
saving) stuff, maybe also for VESA frame buffer stuff, but other than
that, its settings are partially read and the BIOS is no longer taken
into account.

Of course, a system hang is Not Nice[tm] and should be fixed by the
respective maintainers IF IT IS an actual bug. Please check the cabling
or use hdparm to use more conservative transfer modes before assuming
it's a bug with Linux -- a "cp" hang certainly warrants investigation.

OTOH, mount should not hang if you mount the wrong part of the disk, but
complain instead, however, I'm not sure if a bogus partition entry can
cause these hangs.

Re: Re: 2.4.9 to 2.4.14 bug & workaround

[joeja]

Hmm, 

>>    Device Boot    Start       End    Blocks   Id  System
>> /dev/sdb4             1      1536     98288    6  FAT16

>.which is evidently there?

I found out some of my disks have no partition table 'readable by Linux'.  Which is really f***** weird since, they can be read under NT.  What is also really weird is that some of these disks can be mounted as /dev/hdd4 even though there is no valid partition.

In some cases these are zip disks that were readable under 2.2.x, but since I don't have 2.2.x anymore I cannot verify that they would still be readable.  Rather strange that a disk partition would just disapear like that.  Unless the drive itself is hiding it or not recgonizing it.

In any case it seems if I run fdisk against the disks and then mformat they behave better.  But aren't zip disks formated and partitioned out of the box?  These ones all were.

>> Until now I thought it had something to do with the different gendisk,
>> LDM or so.

>Well, you may also see firmware and/or design flaws in the drive
>(personally, I have never trusted iomega, because on the CeBIT fair in

Mine is not an 'iomega' drive, but a copy.  Made by someone else. AFAIK.

>Hannover, I once asked them "why should I prefer iomega ZIP or JAZ over
>SyQuest" and they had no answer except "we're just better". I later
>heard complaints about the SCSI ID only to be chosen from 5 or 6, 
25-pin

I got mine cause it was cheap, internal and I already had zip disks.  

>Judging from what's on that page, the IDE driver seems to know it's >just
>a "floppy" without partitions, but the USB driver sees the (fake)
>partitions.

This would explain what I am seeing, weird as it may seem.  I used to be using an external iomega zip drive that recgonized these disks, but now the internal one does not seem to.

I guess this means that I have to run fdisk on all these disks. Then mformat.

Hmm, it would be nice if there was a workaround.

Joe