[nmglug] Using Media Bay Devices In Dell 600m With Fedora Core 3

[Gary Sandine]

On Mon, Jun 06, 2005 at 05:11:11PM -0600, William D. Nystrom wrote:
> On Mon, June 6, 2005 5:00 pm, Gary Sandine said:
...
> > Can you elaborate on "not been able to get this to work"?
>
> When I try to boot up with the media bay hard drive installed, the
> boot process appears to hang.  I've let it hang for a few minutes
> but not for a really long time so if there was a really long timeout,
> then I have not seen that.
>
> > What have you tried?  Any error messages?
>
> Only thing I have tried is booting with the media bay hard drive
> installed
> and trying to research the problem.
>
> > Does the system boot at all with the media bay hard drive
> > installed?  If so, what does
>
> No.  The system will boot with the media bay empty, filled with the
> CDRW/DVD combo drive or filled with the extra media bay battery.  It
> will not complete the boot process with the media bay hard drive
> installed.

Oh, OK.  How far does it get before it hangs?  What are the few
messages prior to hanging?

> Something which I read in a book talked about possibly having to do
> something to a harddrive to make it a slave drive if it was going to
> be a second data drive.  I don't know if that applies to my situation.

Hm, maybe, but most laptops I have seen have two IDE channels
and have the hard drive on the primary channel and the optical
drive (plug) on the secondary channel.  I have a media bay
hard drive caddy around -- I will give a try when I get a
chance (never used one before).

I wonder if you install the drive and go into BIOS setup if
both disks are detected and identified properly?  Do they list
as primary and secondary master devices?

-- 
Gary Sandine <gars at laclinux.com>