Now that you have received your nice little UDB, you'd like to set it up with a cheap hard drive heh ? Well guess what ? CPU Micromart lies like the devil. Mini IDE hard disks work very well under Linux ! And they are cheaper than the SCSI, with which you generally need an external case and everything. There is one problem though. These Mini IDE drives come with a non standard 44 pins interface. In front of that problem, there are two solutions : The first one is to look for the appropriate cable (good luck...) and eventually to throw a couple more bucks than expected. However, there is another solution and this is the one I am going to describe, because I think everybody here knows how to plug -in an IDE cable, will it be 44 pins or 40 pins.
What you will need
A regular 40 pins IDE cable (check your closet). The shorter the better, but not too short ! (I know that sounds already contradictory). You want it to be about twice as long as your Mini IDE disk.
2 adapters to plug mini-IDE drives on a regular IDE interface.
Now these are fairly easy to find. I got mines from Fry's at San Jose. They come with a mounting bracket which will be fairly useful to mount your drive in the Multia.
A male-male power chord (the sames as the ones that you use in reg PCs)
If you can't find one, there are 2 options here : make your own if you are not afraid of using a soldering iron, or buy a standard Y power cable and leave one end loose.
The firmware update from Digital (4.33).
You will need to floppy images : The one named udbupd38.img, which is the actual upgrade, and udbfsl38.img, which is the fail-safe floppy (in case something went wrong...). Write them to floppy disks using the rawrite utility as you used to do for those Intel Linux disks...
Firmware upgrade
Once you have all these, you are set ! Start with the firmware update : Go to your ARC console, then choose the option "Install new firmware", under the "Supplementary menu". Put the floppy into the drive and follow the instructions on screen. It will take a few minutes, and the UDB will reboot by itself in the middle of the process. It is normal. Just let do its thing, and once it is finished, it will tell you. You can now reboot your Multia, you have the latest firmware available, and it will be able to detect your IDE drives.
Installation of the harddrive
Ok, now you probably already have connected the two adapters and the cable/power cable together. Fairly easy, you think, but how the heck can I put everything in this tiny little Multia ? Well the trick is not that hard. First, screw the harddrive to a mounting bracket. Then, you will have to remove the floppy drive, and put the harddisk at the bottom, in its slots. But first, you want to plug the "cable" between the mainboard and the harddrive. Then you can put the harddrive in its slots. But put it upside down, or else the two adapters will probably be too big and prevent each other to be in its place. AND PUT SOMETHING BETWEEN THE ADAPTER AND THE METALLIC BOTTOM OF THE SLOT, or else your nice brand new harddrive might never work at all... Voila ! You can now put the floppy drive on top of this, leaving the cables between the harddrive and the floppy drive, in the space that was supposed to be used by the harddrive when it was in the "correct" position. If you don't get it, don't worry, I'll post pictures of the whole procedure here very soon.
The crucial moment : does the console recognizes it ?
Now that we have reached this point, if you have the latest firmware and if everything is plugged correctly, then there should not be any problem. Go to the ARC console, then do "Supplementary menu", and then "Display Hardware configuration". On the second page, you should see your new harddrive detected !. It is now time to install Linux.
