I'm using debian etch, I have a Asus combo on Eide cable and a 160Gb sata hardrive. Im getting sloppy dvd playback so I tried to enable the DMA for the combo but it apears I do not hdparm. Im new to linux and im not sure what to do.
I'm using kernel 2.6.16-2 em64t.

I have another problem. I cant get the fat file systems to mount as the machine starts. I have to manualy mount them everytime. I have done a bit of reading on this and tried a lot of things but nothing has worked.
My fstab looks like this.

# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# <file system> <mount point> <type> <options> <dump> <pass>
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
/dev/sda11 / ext3 defaults,errors=remount-ro 0 1
/dev/sda9 none swap sw 0 0
/dev/hdb /media/cdrom0 udf,iso9660 user,noauto 0 0
/dev/fd0 /media/floppy0 auto rw,user,noauto 0 0
/dev/sda10 /mnt/fedora ext3 defaults 0 0
/dev/sda5 /mnt/drive2 vfat rw,dev,exec,auto,unmask=000 0 0
/dev/sda6 /mnt/music vfat rw,dev,exec,auto,unmask=000 0 0
/dev/sda7 /mnt/video vfat rw,dev,exec,auto,unmask=000 0 0
/dev/sda8 /mnt/backup vfat rw,dev,exec,auto,unmask=000 0 0
/dev/sda4 /mnt/win vfat rw,dev,exec,auto,unmask=000 0 0

BTW I dont have floppy drive i dont know how it got there. I have fedore installed to a drive too.

Thanks in advance if you can help

did you modify your fstab yourself? I'm not %100 positive, but I do believe that it should be "umask" not "unmask", and that may be where your vfat issues are coming from. Also, any time I've seen a umask set in fstab, it's been a set of 4 digits

as for hdparm, what do you mean you don't have it? under ubuntu at least, hdparm is depended on by half a dozen other packages, though debian could be different. Can you run (no quotes) "hdparm /dev/hdb"? And if that fails, try "sudo apt-get install hdparm" (this should install hdparm, if it's not already there).

Thanks amp man, that solved all my problems And why do they call you novice?!!

because, there's no way an experienced linux user would throw a fedora box out the window, let alone use ubuntu

my DVD playback exxperiience improved but ssssstill im getting choppy playback, are there any diretx sortof thing for linux?
BTW i did not like fedora and i just had my Kubuntu cd delivered to me.

sorry about the typing. i think i configured my keyboard wrong as well.