DMA timeouts

[Rick Stevens]

On Tue, 2006-10-03 at 10:05 -0700, Paul Campbell wrote:
> I have Dell Precision 360 that came with RedHat
> pre-installed by Dell. It's been running fine
> for a couple of years
> 
> I added a second WD 120MB.
> 
> Since then I have not been able to get around a
> DMA timeout that shows up on install.
> 
> Following the selection of text or graphics mode,
> it seems to probe the system and it seems to hang
> until timeout ( minutes ) on hda and then does the
> same on hdb.
> 
> I can install but when I did this, I found logon
> was terribly slow.
> 
> This must be an FAQ but google doesn't get me
> a good hit on it.

First, make sure you're not using "cable select" on the drives.  Ensure
the original one is jumpered as "master" and the new one as "slave".
Cable select is probably the worst farking idea since IBM decided to
"flip" the floppy drive select lines on the ribbon cable rather than
use the jumpers on the drive.

It might help also if you put the CD on the secondary controller all
by itself.  In other words, put both hard drives on the primary IDE
controller (one "master" and one "slave") and the CD (and other, slow
"secondary" storage) on the secondary IDE controller.

----------------------------------------------------------------------
- Rick Stevens, Senior Systems Engineer     rstevens at vitalstream.com -
- VitalStream, Inc.                       http://www.vitalstream.com -
-                                                                    -
-  A friend said he climbed to the top of Mount Ranier.  My view is  -
-    that if there's no elevator, it must not be that interesting.   -
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