dma and older hard disks

[Nigel Ridley]

I have just put together an AMD K6 500 using two older small hard disks 
- one 3.5 GB and the other 2.5 GB. They are about 6-7 years old.
after doing the initial install, then the upgrade (including KDE 3.5.3) 
I rebooted and noticed in the boot messages a warning that dma is not 
enabled and that accessing the hard drive[s] might be slow (or something 
like that). YES, they are slooooow.

So, my question: How can I determine if it safe to enable dma on these 
two oldish hard drives?

Blessings,

Nigel

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