[ALUG] Re: Asus P5W DH Deluxe mainboard and IDE interfaces

[Barry Samuels]

I've had to have a two day break from this thread because I decided to  
try my two hard drives on the JMicron interface and the DVD drive on  
the Intel interface. The mainboard manual says the JMicron interface  
supports up to 2 devices.

The short version of the story is that I ended up with the file systems  
on both drives comprehensively trashed! Linux is normally very good at  
recovering from file system errors but it couldn't do anything with  
these.

The long story: After swapping interfaces I booted the machine using a  
Knoppix v5.1 CD, because I'd need to change device names in a couple of  
files, but went into the BIOS first. The DVD registered as the first  
primary drive in the first main menu screen as expected but it seems  
very odd that once in the BIOS any devices connected to the JMicron  
interface are not listed anywhere. Drives are set as Master and Slave.

They are shown, briefly for about 5 seconds, just before entering the  
BIOS and it was here that I noticed that only one hard drive was shown  
after the heading 'HDD:' but the name that followed was just a random  
collection of letters and numbers, the font was also broken up  
(characters had gaps in them), and that line of text was flashing.

I left the BIOS and continued with the boot into Linux and tried  
mounting one of the partitions. On seeing the message that 'the
filesystem has errors' I didn't go any further but closed down the
system.

I then swapped the cables back to their original positions and tried to  
boot but it hung a short way into the process. I decided to swap the  
primary drive and DVD drive back into my old machine and boot from the  
same Live CD to examine the hard drive. The contents were basically  
rubbish! I spent quite a lot of yesterday restoring from tape which, as  
there is a fair amount of data, was a rather slow business. The tape  
was up to date as far as early yesterday morning so I lost a couple of  
unimportant emails but that was it.

So I'm not over impressed with the JMicron interface so far.

-- 
Barry Samuels
http://www.beenthere-donethat.org.uk
The Unofficial Guide to Great Britain