Am Interested to know whether FC9 can be installed on internal sata SSD or it supports pata drives only?

I've got some really, *really* old IDE hard drives, like a Conner CP3024 drive which is a whopping 21 megabyte in size. I've been trying to rescue it, but there seems to be some strangeness with the disk geometry. The data sheet for the drive says you should set the CHS drive geometry to 615/4/17 in the BIOS, which is some kind of "virtual" geometry, which uses some feature Conner calls "Universal Translate Mode". But this is not the *physical* geometry of the drive, which you get when you let the BIOS auto-detect or query the drive with hdparm, which shows up as 636/2/33. The problem comes when attempting to read the drive. For some reason the drive thinks it's in the virtual geometry mode, and will throw read errors for every sector number above 17. I finally fixed this by using a really old version of a Linux distro, where you can pass

=615,4,17

as a boot parameter and force Linux to obey a certain drive geometry. This feature seems to have been removed as Linux moved over to libata - and I can't find any way to do the same under a modern Linux kernels. Does an alternative way to override drive geometry exist?

Assume that we have two disks, one master SATA and one master ATA. How will they show up in /dev?

I have an ATA hard disk in my laptop, running Fedora 11, kernel 2.6.30.10-105.2.23.fc11.i586. I am looking to upgrade the disk in here (would love to get an SSD) but I forgot if it's a serial ATA or an old parallel ATA interface. There's not much use upgrading to an SSD if it's PATA... How can I tell if the disk is connected via a PATA or an SATA interface?

For fun, I'd like to "revive" a vintage computer, but this requires to hardware reformat a PATA disk. I found on the net the formatting utility from the vendor but it works only under Windows and I have no Windows computer. I don't think the utility would be effective in Wine because it needs to access the hardware and, to my knowledge, Wine and Linux won't let any program do that for obvious safety/security reason. I can connect the drive to an USB attachment -- my PC motherboard has no PATA interface. The drive will be detected as a SCSI drive because SCSI-3 is now a framework above the various hardware layers SATA, PATA, SCSI, … I can write a small program with enough privileges to send SCSI CDBs (I have previous experience with SCSI-1 and SCSI-2) on /dev/sd? but I wonder if SCSI command FORMAT (4) would be correctly translated to the PATA equivalent command. Has anybody any idea/experience if this is feasible?

When issuing the ATA secure erase command via hdparm against multiple SATA (non-SSD) drives it occurs in parallel. However when the same command is issued against PATA drives, it occurs consecutively. For example the second PATA drive does not commence its process until the first process has completed. Is the ATA Secure Erase command limited by a single PATA channel ? If yes, why would it be since its an internal routine of the drive controller? Can it be overcome with independent IDE channels? Note in issuing the dd command to wipe the drive, it occurs in parallel. PATA drives have historically been is use in aging and legacy devices that are now being decommissioned. The requirement is to securely wipe the drives as they contained sensitive data such as personally identifiable information.

I don't have any IDE drives and my only SATA hard drive is running in AHCI mode, but my initrd image loads the pata_atiixp module. Is it safe to disable this module? And what about the ata_generic one?

Though I've got quite a good basic understanding of sysfs meanwhile, there are still things I cannot solve on my own. For a starter, I'd like to figure out *via sysfs* (later by scripting of course) which channel a block device (HDD, DVD...) is connected to. The funny thing about it is that it is possible for me how to figure out __master or slave__! There is an internal ID deeply rooted in the sysfs tree which gives this away: so 9:0:1 will mean that the device is connected to a (primary OR secondary) __slave__ channel. (master when last digit 0; slave when last digit is 1) OK, but this will still not tell me whether it's the primary or secondary channel. While doing some research about this, I found a __Linux 2.6__-related post in LKML: https://lkml.org/lkml/2006/3/25/20 revealing a sample path like ../../../devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:04.0/ide0/0.0/. Well this is EXACTLY what I need! Unfortunately though, the ideX is nowhere to find in sysfs as of Linux 3.x. Maybe it was removed for good in kernel version 3?