Hi marhleet

Ok, seems bargains arn't always so. Yes, iv'e got mixed drives at the moment with out any problems, but i tend to frett over anything new, for a whileat least anyway (grin).

Related, but a little off thread ... Something to watch out for ... I had a ata33 with a ata66, flashed back to ata33, just to stop windows from going into compatability mode, on a ata33 board. Linux would set them at udma2 at boot, but i also had a some script in /etc/init.d/local that was run at the end of boot which used hdparm to set dma settings. At the time i though it was a good idea, but it's not really neccessary. The kernel does it fine. But ... then i got a new maxtor ata133. The kernel matched it to the boards controller at boot with a udma2 setting, but then hdparm, via the script, reset it to it's highest value, 4 or 5 i think. It would be ok for a period, but once i started to do transfers ... bang, Total scramble. I had to reset to recover. The eventual result was a stuffed up disk (grin).

Always best to watch out for that with new drives i think

>>
don't report their stats correctly to BIOS when the 80 pin cable is used.
>>

I guess you mean, going by your later post, that, thats really to do with your buggy bios and funny disks at the time, rather than as a policy.

I believe the 80pin cable just provides for better earthing, and so, less emf/harmonic line interference in the cable during transferes.

It's a curious thing, isn't it , even though the "99 99 99 99" Lilo message is saying it can't find it's secondary boot file(s), in a way it was quite correct !. Just that the most common reason wasn't.

What bios were you using at the time.


jm


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