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How can I get Solaris to see the third ATAPI controller?

Solaris 7 can be
configured to support any ATAPI compliant controller which doesn't
conflict with any existing device. The key factor is that its interfaces
must be complaint with the ATAPI specs. In other words, you need two
ranges of non-conflicting I/O ports, and an free IRQ, and hardware that's
compliant with at least the ATA-2 and SFF-8020 specs. If it's a legacy-ISA
ATA controller than you'll have to manually configure everything via the
Device Configuration Assistant (DCA)
menus because the DCA only automatically probes for ISA-IDE devices
at the two standard address ranges. If you're adding a compliant PnP-ISA
ATAPI controller or a compliant PCI-IDE controller then the DCA should
automatically configure everything for you because all PnP-ISA-IDE and
PCI-IDE devices are self-identifying devices.


The problem you're likely to encounter is there aren't many compliant
add-in ATAPI controllers available. Most of them want to do revolting
things like share ISA IRQs 14 or 15, or advertise the wrong range of
I/O ports or don't specify the right PCI-IDE class bytes. In particular
most SoundBlaster-IDE cards have a broken Alternate-Status register.
The Solaris 7 ata driver assumes that the Alternate-Status register works
as specified in the ATA-2 spec. Unlike the other non-compliant hardware
problems, there's a trivial workaround for the SB-IDE hardware bug (i.e.,
don't use the Alt-Status register) but I've no idea whether anyone at Sun
has spent the 15 minutes it would take to apply the fix to Solaris 8.


If you've got an add-in ATAPI controller card that doesn't come with
specs that clearly spell out that it won't conflict with your existing
controllers, or if it requires you to disable any built-in controllers,
then that's almost certainly one of those bogus controllers that isn't
fully compliant with the ATAPI specs. I haven't yet found a legacy-ISA
ATAPI card that works correctly (they all want seem to want to
share IRQ 14 or 15), but people persist in telling me they exist. If you
do find a compliant one then the Solaris 7 ata driver will work with it
just fine.


[Save yourself some trouble and use a SCSI controller and disks. - ed.]


[Thanks to Bruce Adler]



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