Preconfiguration Information

If there are two IDE drives on the same controller, one must be set to "master" and the other to "slave." Typically, if there is both an IDE hard disk drive and an IDE CD-ROM drive, the hard disk drive is the master, and the CD-ROM drive is the slave, but this isn't mandatory. If there is only one drive on a controller, it must be set to master.

Supported Settings

Primary controller:

Secondary controller:

If an IDE CD-ROM drive is installed, the system BIOS parameter for that device should be:

If an enhanced IDE drive is installed, set the system BIOS as follows:

If the BIOS supports autoconfiguration, use this facility to set the number of heads, cylinders, and sectors for the IDE hard disk drive. If this capability is not supported by the BIOS, use the settings provided by the disk manufacturer.

Known Problems and Limitations

• The Panasonic LK-MC579B and the Mitsumi FX34005 IDE CD-ROM drives cannot be used to install the Solaris operating environment and are not supported.

• Several vendors ship PCI-equipped machines with IDE interfaces on the motherboard. A number of these machines use the CMD-604 PCI-IDE controller. This chip provides two IDE interfaces. The primary IDE interface is at I/O address 0x1F0 and the secondary interface at 0x170. However, this chip cannot handle simultaneous I/O on both IDE interfaces. This defect causes the Solaris software to hang if both interfaces are used. Use only the primary IDE interface at address 0x1F0.

• You cannot boot from the third or fourth IDE disk drives, although you can install Solaris software on them.

• The Solaris Volume Management software does not work with the Sony CDU-55E CD-ROM drive no matter how it is configured (as the master or the slave). Comment out the following line in the file /etc/vold.conf to prevent vold from hanging the controller:

  # use cdrom drive /dev/rdsk/c*s2 dev_cdrom.so cdrom%d

• NEC CDR-260/CDR-260R/CDR-273 and Sony CDU-55E ATAPI CD-ROM drives might fail during installation.

• Some systems may have problems booting from IDE drives that are larger than 512 Mbytes, even though the install to the drive succeeds. Disable logical block addressing, and reduce the CMOS geometry information for the drive to be less than 1024 cylinders.

• The Sony CDU-701 CD-ROM drive must be upgraded to use firmware version 1.0r or later to support booting from the CD.