Please keep the old IDE chipset drivers so that external CD writers can work

[Rick Knight]

Wenzhuo Zhang wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Starting from Gutsy, the old IDE chipset drivers are no longer included in the kernel package. 
Could this be my problem? See post "Help with Gutsy upgrade" in this 
list. After an upgrade from Feisty to Gutsy the new kernel will not load 
my hard drive. When I upgraded from Dapper to Feisty, the upgrade set my 
drives up as /dev/sdx (in GRUB and /etc/fstab) and I could not boot. I 
changed the drives back to /dev/hdx and that solved the problem. Gutsy 
does not seem able to deal with /dev/hdx so, could this be why I can't 
boot the 2.6.22.14-generic kernel? I have a 4 year old Soyo motherboard 
with Via chipset. Can I rebuild the kernel to get this older IDE 
support? I can still boot into my Feisty kernel.


> The libata based drivers, being cleaner and easier to maintain, have taken the places of the old drivers.
>
> However, external CD writers don't work with the new libata based IDE drivers. Please see bug report #109211 <https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux-source-2.6.20/+bug/109211> for details. Considering that external CD/DVD writers are widely used hardware, I suggest keep the old IDE drivers until this bug is fixed, so that users can still use their external CD/DVD writers in Ubuntu after very little manual configuration. They should not conflict with anything if not loaded.
>
> Wenzhuo
>
>   
Thanks,
Rick Knight