Cecil told me to create a new post....

Is it possible to install Knoppmyth then remove the optical drive and replace with a hard drive.

If so what steps do I have to take.

I will have another Slave backend/frontend with an optical drive in it.

I use a USB cd-rom to install.

You should be able to swap in a harddrive, partition it (fdisk), make the filesystem (mke2fs) and set a mound point (fstab) pretty easily. You can run man for each of thoes commands to learn more about them.

Thanks Ryan the issue I have is that when I remove the optical drive. I get DMA errors.

Does this mean I have to issue some kind of unmount command to the optical drive so that knoppmyth no longer sees it and now sees the drive instead?

Install. Power down. Remove Optical, install hard drive. Power up.

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cesman

When the source is open, the possibilities are endless!

Are you swapping the cd-rom drive for the hard drive with the power on? You have to turn off the computer first.

Assuming you have the power off, ensure you have both drives on the cable correctly configured for slave/master (don't use "cable select", "CS" or "auto"). And you are using the correct cable (40 or 80 conductor depending on the ATA channel type). And try each drive at both cable connectors. And the BIOS setup program correctly detects both drives. Also try disabling the different DMA options in the BIOS setup program one at a time.

Yes of course I am shutting down the power and then removing the drive.

I am using high quality cables.

THanks for the help guys.

High quality is fine and good, but is it the correct cable? maybe you are using a 80 condustor cable and the drive once works with a 40 conductor cable?

The drive is a hp dvd writer. Basically a benq clone.

The drive support ultra dma 2-4.

The only issue could be that the motherboard is quite old. It only supports up to udma 100