This document is intended to explain how to use Ultra-DMA aka Ultra-ATA aka Ultra33 hard drives and controllers with Linux. In some cases there is no difficulty in using them, but some tweaking can increase performance. In other cases, you need to go to extraordinary lengths simply to access your hard drives.
The information in this is document is, to the best of my knowledge, correct, and should work. However, there may be typos, there may be mysterious transmission errors, and there may be strange incompatibilities within your own system that prevent the techniques described herein from working properly. So... before you go fiddling around with you hard drive, BACK UP ANY DATA YOU WANT TO KEEP! If you are not already performing regular backups, please start doing so for your own good.
Brion Vibber ( brion@pobox.com) - The document itself
Gadi Oxman ( gadio@netvision.net.il) - The Promise Ultra33 patch & finding the secret numbers for the workaround
John G. ( prefect@ipass.net) - VIA VP2 patch & info
Giovanni ( giovanni@sudfr.com) - UDMA-enabled VIA-related patch & more info
Martin Gaitan - Promise ide0/ide1 workaround
Norman Jacobowitz - Bugged me to add info on the VP3
André Balsa ( andrebalsa@altern.org) - Provided some general UDMA info and the udma-generic patch for Intel TX, SiS, and VP1.
Masayoshi Nakano - Japanese translation
Maxime Baudin - French translation
v1.45, 6 July 1998: Minor updates - Red Hat 5.1 and 2.0.34 patch for Promise Ultra33.
v1.41, 3 May 1998: Fixed a couple of typos, added translators to credits.
v1.4, 28 April 1998: UDMA-Generic patch, some more general info. Copying section added.
v1.3, 5 March 1998: VIA VP3 info, better patching instructions, pointer to more recent Promise patch.
v1.2, 27 January 1998: Additional Promise workaround info.
v1.1, 21 January 1998: New info about VIA chipset, installing around the Promise Ultra33, and enabling Bus Master & UDMA transfer modes.
v1.0, 19 January 1998: More or less complete, first version done in SGML.
This document may be freely copied and distributed for informational purposes. It may not be modified, except for reformatting, without the permission of the author. If you wish to translate this document into another language you may do so, however you should contact the author first so that updated versions of this document can be sent out to translators as well as directly to the Linux Documentation Project.