LinuxQuestions.org - Dell D610 can't enable DMA

Hello, I've got a small problem here...

Some background:
Dell Latitude D610
2.6.19-gentoo-r5

I noticed some hiccups when I was doing downloads or anything disk I/O related. I looked through my processes and saw kjournald was bumping up about every 5 seconds. Doing a little bit more exploring, I noticed DMA was not enabled:

localhost src # hdparm -v /dev/hda

/dev/hda:
multcount = 16 (on)
IO_support = 0 (default 16-bit)
unmaskirq = 0 (off)
using_dma = 0 (off)
keepsettings = 0 (off)
readonly = 0 (off)
readahead = 256 (on)
geometry = 65535/16/63, sectors = 156301488, start = 0

This leads to pretty poor performance, as you can see:

localhost src # hdparm -tT /dev/hda

/dev/hda:
Timing cached reads: 4024 MB in 2.00 seconds = 2010.99 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 8 MB in 3.40 seconds = 2.35 MB/sec

So I tried to enable DMA to no avail:

localhost src # hdparm -d1 /dev/hda

/dev/hda:
setting using_dma to 1 (on)
HDIO_SET_DMA failed: Operation not permitted
using_dma = 0 (off)

My lspci looks like this:

localhost src # lspci
00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Mobile 915GM/PM/GMS/910GML Express Processor to DRAM Controller (rev 03)
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Mobile 915GM/GMS/910GML Express Graphics Controller (rev 03)
00:02.1 Display controller: Intel Corporation Mobile 915GM/GMS/910GML Express Graphics Controller (rev 03)
00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) PCI Express Port 1 (rev 03)
00:1d.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) USB UHCI #1 (rev 03)
00:1d.1 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) USB UHCI #2 (rev 03)
00:1d.2 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) USB UHCI #3 (rev 03)
00:1d.3 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) USB UHCI #4 (rev 03)
00:1d.7 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller (rev 03)
00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801 Mobile PCI Bridge (rev d3)
00:1e.2 Multimedia audio controller: Intel Corporation 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) AC'97 Audio Controller (rev 03)
00:1e.3 Modem: Intel Corporation 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) AC'97 Modem Controller (rev 03)
00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation 82801FBM (ICH6M) LPC Interface Bridge (rev 03)
00:1f.2 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82801FBM (ICH6M) SATA Controller (rev 03)
02:00.0 Ethernet controller: Broadcom Corporation NetXtreme BCM5751 Gigabit Ethernet PCI Express (rev 01)
03:01.0 CardBus bridge: Texas Instruments PCI6515 Cardbus Controller
03:01.5 Communication controller: Texas Instruments PCI6515 SmartCard Controller
03:03.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation PRO/Wireless 2200BG Network Connection (rev 05)

I did some searching around and saw that for my chipset (ich6m) chipset, I needed to add support for piix_ata and use that instead of ide. So I went into my kernel and did the following:

-Device Drivers
__--> ATA/ATAPI/MFM/RLL support
______< > ATA/ATAPI/MFM/RLL support
__--> SCSI device support
______[*] legacy proc/scsi/ support
______<*> SCSI disk support
______<*> SCSI CDROM support
______[*] enable vendor specific extensions (for SCSI CDROM)
______<M> SCSI generic support
_--> Serial ATA (prod) and Parellel ATA (experimental) drivers
______<*> ATA device support
______<*> Intel PIIX/ICH SATA support
______<*> Intel PATA MPIIX support
______<*> Intel PATA old PIIX support (experimental)

#make all
#make && make modules_install
#reboot

It didn't seem like any changes were made... The drive still booted up in IDE mode, mounted as /dev/hda. I added hda=noprobe and libata.atapi_enabled=1 to the grub configuration, but whenever I have the hda=noprobe in there, it fails to find a valid hard drive. (yes, I changed the fstab and grub configurations to sda instead of hda, no difference).

I looked around in BIOS for settings I can change regarding the hard drive, but the only thing I can change is the one regarding quiet/nonquiet.

A portion of dmesg:

RAMDISK driver initialized: 16 RAM disks of 8192K size 1024 blocksize
loop: loaded (max 8 devices)
Uniform Multi-Platform E-IDE driver Revision: 7.00alpha2
ide: Assuming 33MHz system bus speed for PIO modes; override with idebus=xx
Probing IDE interface ide0...
hda: Hitachi HTS541080G9AT00, ATA DISK drive
Probing IDE interface ide1...
hdc: _NEC DVD+/-RW ND-6650A, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM drive
ide0 at 0x1f0-0x1f7,0x3f6 on irq 14
ide1 at 0x170-0x177,0x376 on irq 15
hda: max request size: 128KiB
hda: 156301488 sectors (80026 MB) w/7539KiB Cache, CHS=65535/16/63
hda: cache flushes supported
hda: hda1 hda2 hda3 hda4
hdc: ATAPI 24X DVD-ROM DVD-R CD-R/RW drive, 2048kB Cache
Uniform CD-ROM driver Revision: 3.20
PNP: PS/2 Controller [PNP0303:KBC,PNP0f13:PS2M] at 0x60,0x64 irq 1,12
serio: i8042 KBD port at 0x60,0x64 irq 1
serio: i8042 AUX port at 0x60,0x64 irq 12
mice: PS/2 mouse device common for all mice
EISA: Probing bus 0 at eisa.0
Cannot allocate resource for EISA slot 1
EISA: Detected 0 cards.
TCP cubic registered
NET: Registered protocol family 1
NET: Registered protocol family 17
Using IPI Shortcut mode
Freeing unused kernel memory: 204k freed
Time: tsc clocksource has been installed.
input: AT Translated Set 2 keyboard as /class/input/input0

I'm kind of at a standstill... If there are any suggestions, I'd be grateful.