[linuxsh-dev] Some IDE drives have problems with the SolutionEngine

[Adrian S. <adr...@po...>]

Hi,

It seems that not all drives are equally happy with the SolutionEngine;
after wasting nearly a week trying to get a Western Digital WDAC33100 to
work on my system, I gave up and replaced it with a Seagate drive, which so
far has not displayed any problems.
More specifically, the issue with the WD drive was that right on start-up it
was getting into the BUSY state and would never assert DataRequest, no
matter how long you polled waiting for it. Specifying ide0=reset on the
kernel command line didn't help; it would only stop if I sent it
WIN_IDLEIMMEDIATE, but then it would enter a vegetative state and further
attempts to get DataRequest asserted would result in errors.
Interestingly enough, the drive would become available after an interrupt
occurred e.g. a hard-coded breakpoint.
The drive works fine on a PC, so I suspect that it's something to do with
the combination SMSC controller + drive? I had a look at SMSC initialization
code in the gdb stub (which I use to boot) and found nothing wrong.
Any ideas?


Adrian