console history file?

[Mick Mearns <mrkingdaddysir yahoo com>]

Hello;
    I have a DFI P2XBL motherboard with an Intel PII-400, 64M. 
The system is RH7.0 with all gcc and glibc updates. 
With kernels 2.2.16-20, 2.2.18, 2.4.1, and 2.4.2.
The hard drives are Quantum Bigfoot 6.4G, and a Quantum Fireball 8G.
The Bigfoot is detected by the BIOS as PIO-4, the Fireball as UDMA-2

I selected 'use DMA as default' in the kernel(s).
I was compiling a kernel and I got a "timeout waiting for dma" warning. 
The compile completed ok with a bunch of these messages. 
I did a 'hdparm -tT /dev/hda' and it came back with 92M/s and 5M/s for the
Bigfoot and slightly faster for the Fireball.

No matter what I set in hdparm the speed only decreased, or stayed at 5M/S.
Also the Bigfoot drive is stuck in DMA mode ( I think it was sdma3 - the last
of six dma modes.) 
I did not try to change the Fireball - it is set to UDMA-2. 
Both these drives can do 33M/s - according to Quantum's website.

Relative Newbie Question #1 - I have seen people on the list attach a file that
has both the input and the output of various commands - what/where is this
console log?

 This MB uses the Intel 440BX chipset, I compiled 2.4.2 for this chipset and
enabled all warnings etc - same.

 I then put in a 'Promise Ultra33' PCI IDE controller - disabled the onboard
IDE controllers and rebooted. It starts to boot then 'Kernel panic - unable to
mount root on dev 03 00' (This is from memory.)

 The Promise controller works ok for W98SE, but no CDROM in DOS, and kernel
panic for Linux. 
Are there boot parameters that I can issue for the Promise?
I could remove it and recompile for it - any tricks here?

 Relative Newbie Question #2 - when i use 'patch kernel.x.x.x-xx.tar
patch-x.x.x.xx-acx' it patches for a while and I get the 'waiting for dma'
error a few times, then it dies asking for the name of the input file. 
Something about a doc file missing.  It then waits with a 'input file:' ( I
think), prompt

'man patch' did not mention this.

 Relative Newbie Question #3 - now that /etc/fstab is using LABEL how do I
correlate it with fdisk?
 I have sda1, sdb1 - sdb10, and external sbc1, scd1, and scd2 how do I know
which is which from the LABEL in fstab? 
It seems that partitions are now LABEL's - 'df -h' works, but only for mounted
partitions.

( when I find out where the console log file is I will post more info)
 
 Any advice?

=====
Mick Mearns - south of Seattle, U.S.A

"the glass is exactly twice as large as it needs to be!"

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