This is supposed to be the last beta before a final release. I just want to be sure that I didn't mess up anything.

This driver includes tested support for

• UDMA-100
• Promise on-board and external controllers (Ultra66/Ultra100/Ultra100TX2)
• Highpoint on-board and external controllers (HPT366/HPT368/HPT370)
• CMD on-board and external controllers (CMD646/CMD648/CMD649)
• all other controllers supported by original driver, especially all standard on-board controllers should work

Because of lack of hardware, the following features are built-in but untested:

• UDMA-133
• Promise Ultra133TX2

There is no support in this release of

• Compact Flash Cards (the experimental driver supplied with BeOS 5 does not work with this package)
• Software-RAID as provided by many Promise/Highpoint controllers

There are known troubles with

• SyQuest Removable Cardridge Drives (media changes aren't properly detected, so you may encounter data loss after swapping the cardridge; the original driver is affected by this as well)

There are a couple of cases with trouble like failed detection or timeouts, but I couldn't figure out the exact circumstances. Especially, I need feedback if someone has

• a WDC AC28400R drive (7.87GB)
• a Seagate Barracuda ATA/IV 40GB connected to a Promise Ultra100TX2 controller

I reckon that it's not the drive or controller but something else, so I would be happy if someone could report them to be working (or not working).

In most cases, installation as an user add-on is a safe bet. You can disable them on boot if something fails and I added an (un)installation option that let you remove the driver if installed as an user add-on.

If you boot from a SCSI disk you must install via replacing the system drivers, else you won't be able to boot anymore. Uninstalling the drivers in this case involves booting from a rescue system and back-replacing the original drivers in the system directories. So, you probably don't want to do that.

Please make sure to read the complete ReadMe. There will be a copy installed on the Desktop and it will also be shown before installation. You will regret not having done so as soon as your computer won't boot anymore.

And last but not least:

Thanks for testing.

This is the initial public release. I call it gamma, as I sent it to a couple of beta-testers already. They didn't encounter major problems (particularly noone reported data loss), so it should be quite stable now. But as there are loads of possible hardware configurations around, you should still be careful.

There are two ways to install it: either as a user add-on or by replacing the system drivers. The first one is easier to get rid off (just disable user add-ons during boot), the second way offers you the ability to create boot floppies. For your convinience, I have a created a boot floppy image for you, so you can usually live with the user add-on installation.

If you have installed the beta into the system folder, you have to restore the ATAPI driver with the original one from the BeOS CD, as replacing it is not longer required!

• all the brave beta testers
• Søren Schmidt for releasing the FreeBSD IDE driver source code and helping me out of many frustration by giving helpful hints

This package contains an image of a boot floppy to be able to install BeOS on a hard disk connected to a controller not natively supported by BeOS. There are two scripts included: one to copy the image to a disk under BeOS and another one to do the same under DOS/Windows.

To install BeOS, boot from CD via this floppy.

After installing BeOS, don't forget to install the driver too. Details are described in the ReadMe of the main driver package.