dma hell!!

i have just reinstalled rh 9.2 and on reboot everything went fine untill...

hdb error: (somthing to do with dma)
hdb: drive not ready for command {drive ready seekcomplete}

etc etc etc, it then did the same thing for hda as well.

will try to get full error message if i can try to boot (i get a "grub>" command line at startup after i had to do a hard reboot)

any ideas as to why this may be happening?

oh by the way, if it will be faster to reinstall tell me cos i am going to need it to resurect a windoze computer from "spyware, hackers and virus hell" and if i used a windoze pc i would get infected as well (linux is immune to windoze viuses :D)

Well, sorry to tell you, but that message often indicates hardware failures. You can try to turn off DMA on the hard drives, but that will make it much slower. I don't remember the kernel commandline option to do that, but once the system is up you can do it with "hdparm -d0 /dev/hda /dev/hdb".

It may be that you don't have the correct IDE chipset drivers in your kernel. I've had that problem when I forgot to compile them (DMA wouldn't turn on).

Hi there,

I'm with a dma problem too. I have a IBD Deskstar 40GB on a Mandrake 9.2 (kernel 2.4-22) and I notice that my /dev/hdc (the IBM's one) doesn't use dma. I've tried to set it on with hdparm -d1 /dev/hda but it doesn't do nothing to work.

At the boot time there are few errors with hdc too, they talk about dma status == 0x620 or dma time out etc...

In the harddrake the hdc isn't recognized as an IBM ide, wat sounds really weird to me...

After some hours googling it seems that it is a problem with SMART feature of those ide's but how to solv it? It a driver/linux kernel solution or a firware one?

Hope someone knows how...

Thanks for your time.

SMART is implemented in the firmware. You can turn it on/off from the BIOS setup. 8)