RE: [LUG] Boot Messages

[John Horne <J.Horne at plymouth.ac.uk>]

On 03-Jan-01 at 01:10:35 Trevor Sansom wrote:
> During the loading of Mandrake 7.2 the following
> message appears amongst the many then displayed.
> Can anyone enlighten me as to the significance? Am I
> losing anything by this failure? If possible I would
> prefer to step around this section of the boot process
> as it is rather time consuming.
> 
What kernel is that? The newer kernels - as far as I remember 2.2.16 (or 17)
onwards - have a 'usa DMA by default - option. It seems your disk may have
trouble with this - my old 2GB disk does (tried putting solaris on it, and
it was useless). If you rebuild the kernel then check the help option of the
DMA option - it explains a bit more about it. It seems that the 2.2.18
kernel has this option on by default - it was off for compatability before I
think (could be wrong here).

Alternatively (from rebuilding the kernel) how about trying the 'hdparm'
command to forcibly disable the use of DMA. check the man page for this.
With Redhat7 I set some hdparm parameters in the /etc/sysconfig/harddisks
file.

HTH,

John.

> 
> "Partition check:
>  hda: hda1 hda2 hda3
>  hdc:hdc: timeout waiting for DMA
> ide_dmaproc: chipset supported ide_dma_timeout func
> only: 14
> hdc: irq timeout: status=0x58 { DriveReady
> SeekComplete DataRequest }
> hdc: timeout waiting for DMA


------------------------------------------------------------------------
John Horne, University of Plymouth, UK           Tel: +44 (0)1752 233914
E-mail: jhorne at plymouth.ac.uk
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