Where are drivers located?

[marc1uk]

I want to install a new IDE drive into my Ubuntu setup. It's currently botting off an IDE drive, with read-write access to a windows SATA drive.
When I plug the new drive in, i get an I/O buffer error following the splash screen, and can't boot from either my Ubuntu install or the LiveCD. But I CAN boot from a SLAX LiveCD I have.
It seems to me Ubuntu doesn't support my new IDE drive, while SLAX does. While this may be a naive windows-minded way of thinking, can't I just copy the SLAX drivers/configuration to my Ubuntu install? Trouble is i don't know which or where those files/settings would be.

Please post any help, or any other suggestions, no matter how vague. This is the last piece to my Ubuntu install, and I'm totally stumped. I'd really rather not have to give it all up now.

[marc1uk]

C'mon people, nothing? I may well be oversimplying the problem - but compatibility on one distro, not on another? There must be some way of transferring that? Or ANY other ideas.

So far scouring the web this Buffer I/O error on device dev/sda1/ doesn't seem uncommon, but all the solutions I've found haven't worked:
*burning to DVD rather than CD, and reducing the burn speed.
*adding the boot parameters irqpoll, ide=nodma, or ide=reverse
*disabling the floppy drive in the BIOS settings
*modifying the fstab file to include the device, or the device.map, although the fact that it won't even boot from LiveCD suggests it's not a simple matter of adding the devices to these files (I think?)
*changing the position or master/slave setting of the drive.

I also read something about GRUB interaction with the BIOS with respect to Extended LBA partitions, which this has, but frankly it was all well over my head. Although SLAX uses LILO rather than GRUB, GRUB itself seems to load fine and it's when trying to mount the devices I believe that the error occurs - i.e. at a later stage, suggesting the boot loader isn't the problem (I think?)

Specifically, the system crashes after successfully running the /scripts/casper-premount. It seems to be the next step, whatever that is, where the problem lies.

[oz]

Just a guessing at a possible solution here, but make sure that you are using one of the newer 80-conductor cables, and not one of the older 40-conductor cables on that drive.

[marc1uk]

Just a guessing at a possible solution here, but make sure that you are using one of the newer 80-conductor cables, and not one of the older 40-conductor cables on that drive.

I think they're 80 conductor.. how would I tell? The drive works fine in SLAX and Windows - is this just a Ubuntu issue?

[oz]

I think they're 80 conductor.. how would I tell? The drive works fine in SLAX and Windows - is this just a Ubuntu issue?

You can check down toward the bottom of this post for some photos that show the difference:

Ultra DMA (80-Conductor) IDE/ATA Cables

I'm not sure that it's really an Ubuntu issue so to speak, but I remember reading some Ubuntu bug reports about IDE drives not being detected and as it turned out, most of those having the issue were indeed using 40-conductor cables. Maybe it will be something as simple as that for you.

[marc1uk]

You can check down toward the bottom of this post for some photos that show the difference:

[link]

I'm not sure that it's really an Ubuntu issue so to speak, but I remember reading some Ubuntu bug reports about IDE drives not being detected and as it turned out, most of those having the issue were indeed using 40-conductor cables. Maybe it will be something as simple as that for you.

Thanks for the suggestion, unfortunately it looks like I've got 80-conductor cables to the relevent hard disks.
might try the alternate CD, some people seem to think that works. although if it does, I'd still then rather copy the relevant files to the existing installation than overwrite it completely. I've already had to solve some other issues, and wouldn't like to try my luck at remembering how i solved them...

[rcgreen]

I think this is a hardware error. If you are already booting
from an ide drive, the OS configuration is ok.
Make sure both ide drives are jumpered for cable select
and the boot drive is at the end of the cable.

[marc1uk]

I think this is a hardware error. If you are already booting
from an ide drive, the OS configuration is ok.
Make sure both ide drives are jumpered for cable select
and the boot drive is at the end of the cable.

Thanks for the tip, I've tried several combinations of primary/secondary master/slave, none of which have worked so far, but I'll give that specific combo another go just in case.

Edit: Checked that setup, and indeed no luck. Thanks for the effort.

[marc1uk]

Okay, tried LILO, and more lack of luck. How do I uninstall LILO, I prefer GRUB and the Ubuntu loading bar... Although it's a bit irrelevant if I don't solve this soon. I just can't make the switch if i can't access all my HDs, and i'm officially 100% out of ideas. Tried for help on 3 forums, along with a lot of research. No solutions yet...

[marc1uk]

Well, eventually I backed up everything off the drive onto DVD (took a while on a 160GB drive!), tried to format it, although windows wasn't having it, and ground to a halt half-way through. Possibly it was the drive after all that. Eventually I split the drive into two, managed to format one in windows, and the other in linux. Couldn't format it using as ntfs using mkfs -t ntfs, getting a mfks.ntfs not found error, so ended up formatting it as a linux partition. And, after a few disk checks, it seems to have worked. Not an ideal solution, as 70GB of my HD is now accessible only to linux, but it's good enough. Solved, of a fashion.