IDE DMA not turning on

[Bob]

For reasons I've yet to discover, when NLD is booting up, using F2 I see
a message that DMA is not enabled on my IDE hard drives. Thus, every
setting in my sysconfig/ide is ignored. Everything is PIO.

This is a dual boot machine and Windows is using DMA to access my hard
drives.

I've looked at every setting in the BIOS; nothing I can see references
the IDE channel's mode.

If anyone has any thoughts, I'd love to hear them.

Bob

[Andrew C Taubman]

Which NLD version? Ate the disks and controller SATA or PATA drives? If
it's a Linux 9.x kernel and SATA/PATA then with some machines DMA simply
won't turn on. On the same machines with a 10.x kernel they'll work
fine; the SATA/PATA stuff was changed from a modified IDE driver to a
modified SCSI driver between those two kernel versions and works much
better.
--
Andrew C Taubman
Novell Support Forums Volunteer SysOp
http://support.novell.com/forums
(Sorry, support is not provided via e-mail)

Opinions expressed above are not
necessarily those of Novell Inc.

[Bob]

It's the 9 kernel and PATA. Heck, I've already done several SLED 10
installs. Might as well upgrade this box too.

Something you might be interested in knowing about, BIOS S.M.A.R.T.
settings. Supposedly some disk diagnostic tools in the BIOS and IDE
world. Anyway, I had it on (in the BIOS) and Windows and Linux
installed and came up using PIO. I turned S.M.A.R.T. off; Windows auto
reconfigured to use DMA, Linux stayed PIO. That's why I thought there
might be something I had yet to find in Linux.

However, I'm going to install SLED 10 over NLD 9 so I should see the
problem go away.

Interesting info about the kernel. Thanks.

Bob

[Bob]

I installed SLED 10 over it (not an upgrade, a fresh install) and all is
well with the world.

Have a good day.

Bob

[Andrew C Taubman]

Yay!