I have been trying unsuccessfully over the last 2 weeks to get compactflash working on my Linux system based on mini-ITX (Via CL motherboard, pentium compatible).
I use a CF->IDE adapter to access it just like a IDE hard disk. My compactflash is Sandisk SDCFH-512. Linux can detect it. I can even mount it and do a fdisk on it. However, the moment I try to do anything substantial like copy multiple files or copy 1000 blocks using dd, I lose access to it. Linux loses access to it totally. I can't even do a fdisk on it. I get an error like "Unable to open /dev/hdc". I have looked at newsgroups and tried the following things * Used another CF (same brand) to make sure it wasn't due to a bad CF. Moreover I can access it perfectly well using a USB flash reader/writer (shows up as a SCSI disk). * Tried a compactflash from another manufacturer. * Upgraded my Linux kernel from 2.4.26 to 2.6.7 * Disabled DMA on the IDE drive using hdparm * Built and used kernels with and without devfs. * Used compactflash as a slave on the IDE channel, as a master and on both primary and secondary channels. I get errors like (from dmesg) "hdc: irq timeout: status=0xff { Busy }" (no dma) or "hdc: lost interrupt" (when i had dma enabled) Is there some nasty race condition that I am hitting? Also, now I can't seem to turn dma back on. <snip> everest root # hdparm -d1 /dev/hdc /dev/hdc: setting using_dma to 1 (on) HDIO_SET_DMA failed: Operation not permitted using_dma = 0 (off) </snip> I would appreciate any help/suggestions/pointers. Thanks a lot in advance for reading through this and any help. Prashant P.S Please CC me on the responses. - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/