At 10:56 pm -0400 24.4.02, hysterion wrote:

Hello,

I have SuSE ppc running on a Power Mac 7300/180 with its stock (SCSI) hard drive. I was wondering, if I add a PCI/ATA controller card and connect an IDE drive, would it be recognized? Could I even make it bootable?

For definiteness, the relevant card might be either of these (VST UltraTek or AHARD):

http://eshop.macsales.com/Catalog_Item.cfm?ID=2909 http://eshop.macsales.com/Catalog_Item.cfm?ID=3853

and the first drive I'd try to connect would be this one (Western Digital Caviar, just swapped out of a stock Rev.B iMac):

http://www.tele.pw.edu.pl/~dflaga/ide/wdc24300.htm

This seems to work under Mac OS (http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/IDE.html has numerous reports), are there any reasons why it shouldn't under Linux?

It all depends on the kernel version you are using and whether it has the modules (drivers) installed. Recent versions of SuSE include a 2.4.x kernel with the drivers for many ACARD UltraATA cards included, so it should work out of the box. Older Linux distros may not support it automatically. I don't know about the VST card, though. I have an ACARD Big Claw 66 card (also known as the 6260M), which is identical to the Sonnet Tempo 66 UltraATA card (the Sonnet card is made by ACARD). It works just fine, and yes, I boot off of it. The only caveat is that you need to make sure to get the latest ROM update from ACARD or Sonnet and install it *before* using the card with Linux. That solves a lot of problems with the card. The drive shows up as an IDE drive, not as a SCSI drive. (Under Mac OS, the card does a "fake" SCSI interface, so the OS thinks it's a SCSI drive. Why they do this, I don't know -- it's not as if Mac OS can't deal with IDE...) So if you already have an IDE drive in your Mac, it would be /dev/hdb; otherwise it's /dev/hda. If Linux is already installed on your Mac, you will have to add your new drive (or more properly, the drive's partitions) to /etc/fstab. The IDE drive you use should not make any difference, though you should stick to name brands for quality -- IBM, Seagate, Western Digital, Fujitsu and so on. Hope that helps, John -- John Grantham | Dipl.-Designer (FH) | Homepage http://www.grantham.de/ | LinuxMac http://www.macnews.de/_linuxmac/ Web Designer | AGD Member http://www.agd.de/

At 12:03 pm -0400 25.4.02, hysterion wrote:

My hope is that I'll be able to install a 2.4.x system directly onto the new (IDE) drive, without need to change what's on the old (SCSI) one -- does that sound reasonable? Can I then get BootX to offer the choice of booting from either drive?

So long as the drive is hooked up and recognized by the computer, and it has been formatted correctly, yes, you will be able to install on it from YaST2. As to getting BootX to offer a choice of booting between two partitions, no, not really -- you can toggle between kernels, and/or you can manually type in a new partition number. (If I understood you right.) I don't remember if you can use yaboot with the 7300. If so, it would be easier to use yaboot, as you can predefine boot types, with one type for kernel A and partition 1, and a second type with kernel B and partition 2. Cheers, John -- John Grantham | Dipl.-Designer (FH) | Homepage http://www.grantham.de/ | LinuxMac http://www.macnews.de/_linuxmac/ Web Designer | AGD Member http://www.agd.de/