dma and older hard disks

[gabrielle harrison and Paul van den Bergen]

On Wed, 19 Jul 2006 15:01:22 +1000, Roman Kirillov <sigizmund at gmail.com>  
wrote:

> On 7/19/06, Nigel Ridley <nigel at i-amfaithweb.net> wrote:
>>
>> I'm sending this again as it didn't seem to get thru the first time.
>>
>> 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.
>
>
> Hi Nigel,
>
> Can you provide us with these HDDs models, etc? I think it's pretty safe  
> to
> enable DMA, 'coz for 2G+ models UDMA33 already worked, almost for each  
> one.
> So you can try.
>
> Roman

My first thought was to look up the specs for the HDD in question...

other things to check is BIOS IDE settings.

you can also manually set the dma mode - though for the life of me I can't  
recall how off the top of my head...
Oh. Now I know... atacontrol on FreeBSD... forget I said anything... :-)

still, if it is possible in one versuation of unix it should theoretically  
be possible in all ;-) right? *BG*

that reminds me - is there a inverse man page list somewhere?
perhapos this needs a new email... pardon me...




-- 
Dr Paul van den Bergen
Chance favours the prepared mind