Hi,

I discovered poor performance for dvd burners on a machine. Found out that DMA was not enabled, so I did enable it for the burners. After restart the machine does not boot anymore but freezes at:

Setting up the CMOS clock
Setting up IDE DMA mode

/dev/hda
setting using_dma to 1 (on)
setting xfermode to 68 (UltraDMA mode4)
using_dma = 1 (on)

[same for /dev/hdc and /dev/hdd which are also burners]

/dev/hde:
setting using_dma to 1 (on)



Freezed and does nothing.
/dev/hde is a SATA-Harddisk.

How can I get the box to boot again? Setting ide=nodma does nothing different. Machine is a AthlonXP2400+ on a ASUS Board with SATA-Raid onboard, but only 1 drive attached, and 4 identical dvd burners.

Many thanks,
//mc

hdparm will set drive parameters.
look at the man pages for it.

as root
hdparm -d0 /dev/hda
will turn dma off on a drive.

You may have set the drive too fast also.

You need to boot first though. Can you do an interactive start up by entering I at boot up?

If not boot with a live cd like knoppix and look in /etc/sysconfig/harddisks and edit it.
You'll have to be root.

Good luck

Hi,

thank you very much, you saved my night ;-)

interactive mode did not work (but I didn't expect it to work... somehow this is really buggy, mostly it doesn't trigger).
But the hint with the live cd was great... had a Suse 9.2 here and now the box is up running again.

But somehow now I think it can't be so easy to get full root access to a machine... that was an eye-opener... ;-)

Again, thank you,

Best wishes,
//mc