Secondary IDE channel in QEMU does not seem to work

Question

When I try to wait for the first disk in the secondary IDE controller to be free in QEMU, inb(0x177) always returns 0)

Steps followed:

I tried adding a 3rd disk to QEMU by doing the following:

1) Create a new blank disk image 2) Adding the image as hdc in QEMU options 3) Creating a new file called ide.c to handle the secondary channel. (Using ports 0x17* instead of 0x1F* as specified in the h/w manual)

In ide.c, I have the following to check if the secondary controller exists:

outb(0x173, 0x88);
int r = inb(0x173);
printf("SECONDARY DISK CONTROLLER%s\n", r==0x88?" present":"not present")

& it shows that it does.

But the check device not busy does not work. Does anybody know why that is?

static int
ide_wait_ready(bool check_error)
{
        int r;
        //WAIT FOR !BUSY
        while (((r = inb(0x177)) > 0)
        ;
}