From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/4.78 [en] (X11; U; Linux 2.4.9-13 i686) Description of problem: Redboot fails to boot on a PC containing a ZIP drive. Even inserting a valid ZIP disk does not allow it to boot. Removing the drive from the system allows it to boot. In ide_init(), the Zip drive is simply detected as a disk. In find_partitions(), an attempt is made to read the MBR which never returns. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1.Install a Zip disk in a PC 2.dd if=redboot.bin of=/dev/fd0 3.Reboot the PC with the disk in the drive. Actual Results: The disk starts loading. A number of '.' characters are displayed on the screen. Nothing else happens. Expected Results: After the '.' characters, a RedBoot> prompt should appear. Additional info:
How is the ZIP drive connected? I have a system here with ZIP (on SCSI) which does have this behaviour.
Sorry, my system does _not_ show the problem. Perhaps some diagnostics (prints, etc) in the IDE code can help since I doubt that anyone except for Drew has hardware to test this with.
My Zip drive is IDE. It is the master device on the secondary channel.
The problem is that the ZIP is an ATAPI drive and the IDE/ATAPI code does not work with non-CDROM devices. To fix this properly, the IDE code in RedBoot would have to be made capable of talking to the ZIP. For the moment, the ZIP device will simply be ignored.