IDE replacement driver Download

Description:

About IDE replacement driver:

Replaces standard IDE driver, adding support for UDMA-100, command queuing and Promise controllers.

To increase support of modern IDE controllers and hard disk drives, this driver replaces the entire IDE driver chain apart from the ATAPI driver. In addition to the features provided by the original driver you get support of

• UDMA-100 (prepared to support UDMA-133 as well)
• Command Queuing
• Promise on-board and external controllers
• Ability to install BeOS onto a drive connected to any controller supported by this driver

Command Queuing helps if you have several programs accessing one hard disk at once, as this feature allows the drive to rearrange requests to reduce head seek time. Additionally, bus utilization gets improved, so concurrent access to two disk drives connected to the same IDE channel is almost for free now. Unfortunately, the only drives known to support Command Queuing are those made by IBM.

The last feature is accomplished by a special boot floppy disk you can use for CD install.

Please check you reply-address!

From time to time I get emails with invalid reply-addresses or non at all. As I can hardly answer in these cases, please make sure you set the reply-address correctly. So, if you are still waiting for an answer, this is probably the reason.

Details about this version:

This is supposed to be the last beta before a final release. I just want to be sure that I didn't mess up anything.

This driver includes tested support for

• UDMA-100
• Promise on-board and external controllers (Ultra66/Ultra100/Ultra100TX2)
• Highpoint on-board and external controllers (HPT366/HPT368/HPT370)
• CMD on-board and external controllers (CMD646/CMD648/CMD649)
• all other controllers supported by original driver, especially all standard on-board controllers should work

Because of lack of hardware, the following features are built-in but untested:

• UDMA-133
• Promise Ultra133TX2

There is no support in this release of

• Compact Flash Cards (the experimental driver supplied with BeOS 5 does not work with this package)
• Software-RAID as provided by many Promise/Highpoint controllers

There are known troubles with

• SyQuest Removable Cardridge Drives (media changes aren't properly detected, so you may encounter data loss after swapping the cardridge; the original driver is affected by this as well)

There are a couple of cases with trouble like failed detection or timeouts, but I couldn't figure out the exact circumstances. Especially, I need feedback if someone has

• a WDC AC28400R drive (7.87GB)
• a Seagate Barracuda ATA/IV 40GB connected to a Promise Ultra100TX2 controller

I reckon that it's not the drive or controller but something else, so I would be happy if someone could report them to be working (or not working).

Installation

In most cases, installation as an user add-on is a safe bet. You can disable them on boot if something fails and I added an (un)installation option that let you remove the driver if installed as an user add-on.

If you boot from a SCSI disk you must install via replacing the system drivers, else you won't be able to boot anymore. Uninstalling the drivers in this case involves booting from a rescue system and back-replacing the original drivers in the system directories. So, you probably don't want to do that.

Please make sure to read the complete ReadMe. There will be a copy installed on the Desktop and it will also be shown before installation. You will regret not having done so as soon as your computer won't boot anymore.

And last but not least:

This driver touches the most valuable thing of your computer - your data. So backup first. I am not liable for any data loss. Use it on your own risc!

Thanks for testing.

Related Links:

• Replaces Promise Ultra100/Ultra100TX2 IDE driver

License:

Freeware

Submitted On:

27 Dec 2007

Submitted By:

Karl vom Dorff (karl)

File Date:

27 Dec 2007

File Author:

Thomas Kurschel

File Version:

0.5 Beta

File Size:

128.30 Kb

File Type:

pkg

Downloads:

9

Rating:

Total Votes:0