Hi All,

I recently bought an acer extensa 5510 laptop. I installed a 64-bit Fedora6 onto it. Everything seems fine, except for the speed of the cdrom and the sata hdd. The 24x IDE CDROM can read data from any kind of discs at a speed of 1.33MB/sec. Plus, when I copy data from the cdrom to the hard drive the system is so slow, that the mouse can barely operate and the sound pauses for seconds like some DMA access would be not present.

What can I do with these issues?
Any help/suggestion would be appreciated.
Thanks in advance.

G.

Please bring the system current and install all of the updates for Fedora Core 6, if you are still having speed issues afterwards with the latest kernel for FC6 then it is time to build a custom kernel for the hardware on this laptop. Yes, this is a DMA issue check you /var/log/messages file.

Thanks Lenard!

My Laptop is not connected to the internet currently, so it would be hard to do all the updates. Is there any other way to make the DMA work? I tried to use the hdparm tool to set the DMA, but it said: Operation not permitted. (I tried it with root) How can that be?

Thanks!
G.

The original kernel for FC6 is not very SATA friendly, you can try booting with the option on the kernel line all-generic-ide, but I do not remember if this boot option is in that kernel or not.

The original hdparm package for FC6 is for IDE hard drives mainly and may not work on CD/DVD drives depending on the laptop's IE interface, it does not work with SATA drives at all.