> > My question is actually: what's the general idea behind the drive probes?
>
> There is actually an assumption made by the kernel - that is that
> the drives are NOT busy before starting the probe. In other words,
> the drives have spun up completely, and have finished their
> diagnostics.
So Russell, you want a no assumption call?
> The kernel then writes to the drive/head selection register, reads
> it back and checks that its what it expects it to be. If its not,
> then it immediately assumes that there isn't a drive present.
>
> It then tries to use the IDENTIFY_DEVICE command to read 512 bytes
> of identity information.
>
> > PS: Is there some newer ATA documentation, preferably in pdf? I only found
> > a working draft of the ATA-3 specs in Word format (ouch!)
>
> See www.t13.org
>
> BTW, you may want to look in the EBSA285 BIOS (v1.08 or later) which
> has a working "wait for ide drive to power up" algorithm, but so far
> has been tested only on a Seagate ST36531A and a Conner CFS1080 drives.
> (it does not yet handle the case of only one drive connected as slave).
> _____
> |_____| ------------------------------------------------- ---+---+-
> | | Russell King rmk@arm.linux.org.uk --- ---
> | | | | http://www.arm.linux.org.uk/~rmk/aboutme.html / / |
> | +-+-+ --- -+-
> / | THE developer of ARM Linux |+| /|\
> / | | | --- |
> +-+-+ ------------------------------------------------- /\\\ |
>
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>
Andre Hedrick
The Linux ATA/IDE guy
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