fedora-list Digest, Vol 17, Issue 216

[Nicholas Geovanis]

> Message: 9
> Date: Tue, 19 Jul 2005 03:32:46 +0900
> From: Dave Gutteridge <dave at tokyocomedy.com>
> Subject: Re: [Fedora] Re: Did I make a mistake in starting with Fedora
> 	Core 4?
> To: For users of Fedora Core releases <fedora-list at redhat.com>
> Message-ID: <42DBF5CE.2040401 at tokyocomedy.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
> 
> 
> >    This is probably a dumb question, but have you tried booting with 
> > ide=nodma ?
> 
> It's not a dumb question at all, at least not to me. I do not know how 
> to "boot with ide=nodma". How do I set that so that the boot process 
> will execute with that configuration?
> 
> Perhaps I don't understand the implications of that command, but that 
> does seem to run counter to what I've been hearing so far. I had gained 
> the impression that DMA is something I want to have running for optimal 
> performance, and that my current DMA configuration is somehow flawed. Am 
> I wrong in my understanding that DMA is always desireable?

It isn't desirable at FC4 installation time with certain combinations of
DMA controllers/motherboards and certain CDROM drives. In my case it was
an older Mitsumi drive. No combination of the recommended, non-standard
boot parameters fixed my problem, so I just pulled-out the older CD-ROM
drive, threw-in a newer DVD-ROM drive which had been in a different
machine, and it installed perfectly. Hopefully you can do the same.
In my case the non-system volumes are usually on separate disks so I
can always just start-over or throw the old hard-drive into a different
machine to get to my files.

Suffice to say that this was by far the most difficult installation in 
the nine years I've been using linux. Of course the very same motherboard
and CD-ROM drive had run two previous releases of RH and one earlier
Fedora. I guess something got dropped or overlooked in the course of
driver or Anaconda development but I don't know the details. Fedora's
relatively new and there will be some bumps. You and I just got unlucky.
Technology marches ever onward and sometimes someone gets trampled along
the way. The Mitsumi drive was _many_ years old and I'm cheap.

> Dave

* Nick Geovanis
| IT Computing Svcs
| Northwestern Univ
| n-geovanis@
|   northwestern.edu
+------------------->