IDE card with only one channel?

[strells]

I apologize if this has been asked before, but I haven't seen it anywhere. The PC I have is SATA, but has one IDE channel for the optical drive, which I've used before (to fix a partition after Tivo did a version upgrade a few months back; this is Philips DirecTivo series 1). If I ever want to do a dd of my dual drive setup, can a plug-in IDE card fit the bill? Or do I have to find a PC that has two IDE channels? If it worked with a card, that would be great.

Thanks,
Steve

[WK-Michael]

As far as I know, all IDEs are dual-channel. You might just have a double-ended cable, and need three position cable.

[strells]

No. By two channels, I mean a primary and secondary. I know I can have master and slave on the one channel I have with one cable, but if I need to attach more than one drive and optical drive, I need the secondary channel (hdc and hdd in Hinsdale's instructions).

Steve

[WK-Michael]

Got it. Then you might need a boot floppy to use both positions at once. I'm not sure if there's a boot floppy out there that does LBA48. We boot from a SATA CD drive in one of our PCs, as far as I can remember, so that may be an option. You could also boot from a SATA hard drive, or a flash USB drive.

[WK-JSP]

The weaknees_sata.iso, while generally recommended only for Series3 SATA upgrades, should work for Series2 IDE upgrades too, and supports a variety of add-on PCI IDE cards. It also supports usb attached drives, if you have an external usb case or something like this.

[strells]

The weaknees_sata.iso, while generally recommended only for Series3 SATA upgrades, should work for Series2 IDE upgrades too, and supports a variety of add-on PCI IDE cards. It also supports usb attached drives, if you have an external usb case or something like this.

I've been out of the Tivo hacking loop for a while now, but if this does what you say it does, that's really cool! So I could have a second IDE channel and or a drive in an external USB case? How does this fit into Hinsdale's process? I'm looking for a web page that talks about this boot disk, but I can't find it. Can you point me in the right direction?

Thanks,
Steve

[WK-JSP]

I've been out of the Tivo hacking loop for a while now, but if this does what you say it does, that's really cool! So I could have a second IDE channel and or a drive in an external USB case? How does this fit into Hinsdale's process? I'm looking for a web page that talks about this boot disk, but I can't find it. Can you point me in the right direction?

Using usb drives is an advanced feature that is not "on the menu" of the usual upgrade instructions. Generally the process will be the same as for PATA and SATA attached disks, once you figure out the right device names to use. The "listdrives" command on this iso will list all the attached drives and tell you their device name (for example, /dev/sda, etc). USB and SATA drives will generally show up as an sd (SCSI) rather than hd (ATA) device.

Again, WeaKnees doesn't support or recommend upgrading via USB drives. As the developer of the weaknees_sata.iso, I'm just saying that technically it should work for the advanced user who's willing to go beyond the basic upgrade instructions. This may be best left to users with some linux experience.