on boot: "not ATAPI compatible"

All:

Until this weekend, I had a working Linux computer. I built it a couple of years ago from components I ordered from various places online (mainly newegg). This weekend, I tried to turn it into a dual-boot with Windows 2000 Pro. I suspect I messed it up at the hardware or BIOS level, because I now get the following message when I try to boot:

Sec master not ATAPI compatible
(not verbatim, but close)

This is the message I get regardless of which IDE bus I use for the CD versus the hard drive.

More details:

I can successfully boot from the CD drive with the Windows Setup CD or the Red Hat CD. Both installers can see my hard drive, with the new partitions I defined, and they can format it. The installation of both Windows and Linux goes through without apparent problems. But when I reboot (or in the Windows case, when Setup reboots), I am apparently not seeing the hard drive. I can boot only from the CD. In the Windows case, it just starts the setup process over again, not recognizing that it is partly done.

Now, to be honest, I think my IDE setup has always been a bit off. I vaguely recall that I had to have the IDE cables attached in one particular way to be able to boot at all before, but I tried all the combinations I thought were reasonable over the weekend, and I couldn't boot from the hard drive.

The BIOS setup can see the hard drive. Depending on how I attach the IDE ribbons, BIOS sees the hard drive as primary slave or master. I can't remember if I could get it to recognize the hard drive as secondary slave or master. Interestingly, the hard drive access LED lights up for only a second or two, immediately after I power on, in all but one of the IDE ribbon configurations I tried. In the one case, the access LED stays on for a long time, until just before the "sec master" error message.

If I press F1 after the error message, as requested, the computer checks for boot disks in the CD drive and floppy drive (and also apparently the non-existent SCSI drive), but it never tries the hard drive again.

As you can tell, even though I built the computer, I don't know what I'm doing :) Any help appreciated.

-- Marco

Welcome to Windrivers Marco Ha

What make hard drive? Some hard drives do not recognise having a cd as a slave device and you should set the jumpers on the hard drive as a standalone hard drive.... in western digitals for instance, this means removing all jumpers.

Please state the jumper positions, cable positions and which ide ports for all your ide devices. Check in bios to see if the ide devices are set to auto or something else and post what the bios sees please.

Also, depending on where the hard drive cable came from, it could be one that is a "cable select" one. This means the position of the device on the cable determines whether it is master or slave. The jumpers on the devices must be set to "cable select", or "cs".

NooNoo:

Thanks for your reply. It's a Maxtor drive. My memory is that it's jumperless (it was a reasonably modern 60G drive in April 2002). And I don't see any jumpers, although I didn't remove it from the case and inspect it thoroughly.

In any event, the HD was on a different IDE ribbon from the two CDs, so I don't think they were interacting. The HD was alone on the primary IDE ribbon. I'm inclined to think the stuff about the sec master is a red herring. After all, why would (1) seeing the HD, (2) not being able to boot from the HD, and (3) not being able to see the CD be related phenomena?

Last night, I bought O'Reilly's PC Hardware in a Nutshell and learned just enough to be dangerous. I changed three things at once and made progress, so I don't know which of the three did the trick (not very scientific, but I'm in get-it-working mode).

First, I set the BIOS to AUTO for all four IDE devices. Previously, it was AUTO for the secondary but I had specified the Maxtor explicitly for the primary master and left the primary slave blank.

Second, I connected both the CD-ROM and the DVD writer to the secondary IDE channel (DVD writer on the middle connector). I believe all my previous tries had had only zero or one of them hooked up.

Third, I moved the HD from the center connector of the primary ribbon to the end connector. This I learned from the book: there is a difference between 80-wire ribbons and 40-wire ribbons, and I seem to have one of each (is this bad?) and with 80-wire ribbons, a standalone drive should be on the end connector. Now it is.

After making all three of those changes, I no longer get the error message about the sec master. Instead, the machine is trying to boot from the HD and is failing. So I now have a new problem. I will describe the problem here, but I understand it might no longer be appropriate for the hard-drive section of windrivers.

Interesting fact, not necessarily related: When the BIOS prints out its view of the machine after the power comes up, it shows the Maxtor as the primary slave, rather than as the primary master, as I expected from my book learnin'.

Immediately after that, GRUB comes up and lets me choose to boot to 'DOS' (recall that the Win2K installer never completed, which I speculate is the explanation for the name 'DOS') or Red Hat. If I choose DOS, I get nothing but the following:

Booting 'DOS'
rootnoverify (hd0,6)
chainloader +1
This is not a bootable disk. Please insert a bootable floppy and
press any key to try again...

If I choose Red Hat, a lot of stuff apparently works, but then the kernel panics. The last few lines on the screen are the following:

Creating root device
Mounting root filesystem
mount: error 6 mounting ext3
pivotroot: pivot_root (/sysroot, /sysroot/initrd) failed: 2
Freeing unused kernel memory: 232k freed
Kernel panic: No init found. Try passing init= option to kernel.

When I installed Red Hat, I had GRUB written to the MBR, against Red Hat's advice to write it to the first sector of /dev/hda1. That's first on my list of things to change tonight, assuming I can still boot from the CD. Sigh.

Once again, all suggestions appreciated.

-- Marco

Quote:

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Originally Posted by NooNoo

Welcome to Windrivers Marco Ha

What make hard drive? Some hard drives do not recognise having a cd as a slave device and you should set the jumpers on the hard drive as a standalone hard drive.... in western digitals for instance, this means removing all jumpers.

Please state the jumper positions, cable positions and which ide ports for all your ide devices. Check in bios to see if the ide devices are set to auto or something else and post what the bios sees please.

---

no jumper = slave Find the jumper that came with it and set it to master.

If the BIOS sees the Maxtor but will not boot to it, the partition needs to be made Active. I would try this before you frustrate yourself further.

Nothing like hands-on experience such as yours to facilitate the learning process, eh?