How to chk drive DMA status

[colinkhalid]

I have had a lot of success with Mandrivia 10.2 limited edition, so much so that its has become my primary desktop OS. I considered myself to be a windows power user but now Iam a newbie again

I don't know how to find out if my drives are using DMA or not. Iam having system lockups from time to time that are related to prolonged hard drive activity ie downloading a large file ect

Is there anyway of seeing a log of what the system was doing when it crashed ?

Thanks in advance

[bigtomrodney]

Have a look at the hdparm command. It is used for setting and querying harddrive settings. Some of these settings are held in /etc/sysconfig/harddisks, so you can also set/read them here too.

[colinkhalid]

Thanks I will have a look

[LondoJowo]

You should be able to configure DMA on your drive using HardDrake. Look under system tools.