Accessing Secondary FAT32 HD

Wow, what an excellent resource you guys are- I love how every other thread in the forum contains the word "Noob"... here's one more to add to the list :)

I just set up my system to dual boot XP and Mandrake 10.0, I've got 2 80GB hd's, the Primary master has both OS's installed, and I've partioned the secondary HD to be a FAT32 "mule" drive, so that I can share MP3's, avi's, etc between XP and Linux. XP can read the secondary drive just fine, and play MP3 files with no problem, so I know that there's no corruption or other problems of that sort. Mandrake mounts the drive fine, and I can see all my files, but when I try to play them I get all sorts of skipping, scratching, etc- it's exactly as if the transfer rate isn't high enough to keep the stream going- very strange. At first I thought perhaps it was audio drivers, but the same files play perfectly once copied onto the primary drive. Any suggestions?

Sorry for the long post!
Many thanks,
Shiva88

XP 2800+
A78NX Deluxe nforce2
ATI 9600PRO
1GB Ram

Try this (as root):

Code:

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hdparm -d1 /dev/hdb

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Assuming the FAT mule drive is hdb (Primary Slave). 8)

Thanks sarumont, i'll give that a shot just as soon as i get back into linux. What exactly, if i may ask, does that do?

That seems to have done it! Thanks a million! Now, if you could just get my ATI hardware acceleration working.... LOL!
I've read a dozen article on how to accomplish that, and I've just decided that for now i'm too much of a noob for that to happen.

Thanks again!

One more thing... when installing packages, Mandrake keeps prompting me to install to insert CD 4, but I've only got 3! I checked out several of the mandrake mirrors and none of them offer a disc 4 either... what gives?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Shiva88

Thanks sarumont, i'll give that a shot just as soon as i get back into linux. What exactly, if i may ask, does that do?

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My bad...forgot to explain. That turns DMA on for the drive. DMA (Direct Memory Access) allows the drive to read/write to the memory without the CPU's intevention, speeding up read/write times. 8)

Getting ATI hardware accelleration working isn't *that* hard. Mine worked with little to no tinkering on my part.

I'm not sure about the disk4 think..>I'll look into it tomorrow. Time for sleep now. 8)

Hi Shiva88,
Disk4 contains KDE 3.3 and some extra apps for KDE and Gnome . To fix this got to MCC,
Software Management -> Media Manager and select cd4 and remove it. This will telll mandrake to show only the packages that you have on the 3 cds.