FC5: Disabling DMA for CD-ROM Drives?

[Lawrence Houston]

FC5 Users:

With FC5/2.6 Kernels it appears DMA for CD-ROM Drives is enabled by 
default, which does NOT work properly with my Drive/System...  During 
Installation I had problems with the Media Test failing (even though those 
same CD-Rs which compared fine under CentOS3/2.4 Kernel) and Anaconda 
would complain about unreadable RPMs part way through Installation... 
Although typing "linux ide=nodma" at the installation's boot prompt did 
allow the Media Tests and the Installation itself to complete, running the 
installed system with "ide=nodma" effects harddisk performance!!!  On my 
installed system one solution was enabling IDE-SCSI Support on CD-ROM 
Drive, although that generates a warning at boot time:

   ide-scsi is deprecated for cd burning! Use ide-cd and give dev=/dev/hdX as device

and therefore may NOT be good long term solution...  FC5 does NOT appear 
to respond to the boot-time parameter "nocddma" and previously HDPARM 
included a SYSV INIT Script allowing DMA control over individual devices 
(which appears to have been dropped)...  Does FC5 provide another 
mechanism for controlling the DMA Settings on individual Devices???

Lawrence Houston  --  (fedora at greenfield.dyndns.org)