Very slow disk access on a fresh daily install - Inspiron 8200 DELLLaptop.

[Sivan Green]

On 15:11, Fri 07 Jan 05, Chip wrote:
> 
> I've had the same experience on my Inspiron8200 on both Ubuntu and
> RedHat9. What we figured out on RH9 was that we were I/O limited by the
> system polling the CD drive to see if a disc had been inserted. You can
> see that the CPU usage is almost non-existent but you only get a HD
> access on a periodic but slow basis. On RH9 I was able to turn off
> automount for the CD in preferences and the problem went away. I tried

This was the same problem to me also , bascially I was told
that this is due to some of dell laptop machines
(Inspirion82000 among them) were using one IDE channel for
the 2 devices, i.e. both the CDRW/ROM and the HD, on other
systems which use seperate channels (non dell?) you can leave 
the auto media detection in hal and no harm will happen.
I was acutally pretty surprised to find out that this was 
the actual problem,after a couple of months trying to figure this out.

I think my next laptop machine is not going to be from dell,
unless they improve their ways ;-)


Sivan