What is ata2 ?

[Clifton Royston]

On Thu, Apr 28, 2005 at 07:48:00AM -0700, Rob wrote:
> OK, I have opened the box and had a look at this
> ISA card. It's indeed a sound card, "Creative
> SB16/SB32". But it also has one IDE Interface
> connector, which apparently is the ata2 device.
 
Wow, this *is* an old machine!

> So, I thought, let's see how I get this ata2 to work.
> I disconnected the CDrom cable from the motherboard's
> IDE, and connected it to this soundcard.
> Nothing there at bootup; no mentioning of any
> CDrom in the kernel messages.
> (To be sure, I reconnected the cable the other way
> round to the card; same result).
> 
> Does this ISA/IDE require some other additional
> tweaks to become operational? The OS is 5-Stable.

I never tried running it under any BSD.  ISTR that it was a very
messed-up IDE interface which only worked with Creative's brand
CD-ROMs.  I saw a bunch of these back in the day as they were marketed
as upgrade kits when CD-ROMs were just hitting mass-market computers,
and lots of people wanted to add CD-ROMs and sound to their old
computers so they could play games.  A soundcard with extra IDE + a
CD-ROM got them there, barely.

> Eventually I would like to achieve this:
> I have another, very old, PC with following
> configuration:
>   IDE/0 (on motherboard) master and slave harddisks
>   IDE/1 (on motherboard) -broken-
>  
> I like to use this soundcard/IDE controller for
> adding a CDrom to this very old PC. The OS of this
> PC is 4-Stable.

I don't think it'll work for that - too bastardized. I don't know what
they did but they might have changed the pinout or something so that it
was only compatible with Creative CD-ROMs.  In the best case, if you
got it to work, it would be deathly slow.

  -- Clifton

-- 
          Clifton Royston  --  cliftonr at tikitechnologies.com 
         Tiki Technologies Lead Programmer/Software Architect
"I'm gonna tell my son to grow up pretty as the grass is green
And whip-smart as the English Channel's wide..."
                                            -- 'Whip-Smart', Liz Phair