hello all - fairly new to linux. Have installed Redhat 7.3 6 times in 3 days. Each time it works, X works, was xtremely chuffed 1st time - no probs. 1st time it lasted 24hrs then put me into a wierd command line mode with a (STRANGE) shell prompt. Have spent days reading/reinstalling, but it seems to me that my Hard drives are sketching it out. (sorry bear with me) i get timeouts waiting for Dma at bootup and it always says the drive is NOT ready for a command. So what i would like to know is:

will a hd without dma enabled cause the same problem -sounds obvious I know but feel free to laugh.
how do you enable/disable dma for some/all devices and do I want to do this?

Hope someone has an answer to this.

thanx in advance

I don't know what's wrong with your box, but if you want to turn off DMA use "hdparm -d0 /dev/hdx". If you want it back on try "-d1". Check out man hdparm for all sorts of cool stuff...

thanx will try 2nite. only 1 reply so far , hope this works.
thanx stvbrd