First, I have installed Slackware about 30 times since version 8.1. I have also recompiled my kernel about 15 times. I have used Slackware on a laptop for about a year and a half with no problems.

I bought a Gateway MX7525 (AMD64 +4000)laptop. It has a ATI x600 graphics card and a gig of ram. I was excited about getting this thing running. I know I am wanting to use a 32 bit system, but I am a die hard Slacker.

When installing Slackware 10.2, the make swap part of the set up hangs. I can ctrl+c to stop the set up program. So, I thought I would create the swap partition after the install. But after the install, I get a message saying that DMA is turned off. So, now disk preformance is really slow. So I tried using hdparm to set DMA, it did not work. I checked the BIOS and UDMA is turned on.

I then (2.6.13) recompiled the kernel and rebooted, and got a crc error and the boot process stopped. The only difference from my old laptop was I changed the CPU to the Opteron and AMD64 CPU.

Is there a way to turn DMA on? If I could get it turned on, I could restore the backup from my old laptop. But right now, it seems like it will take 10 hours to do it (I am being serious).

I installed Suse and it worked fine. But, I am one of those do or die Slackware user. For that matter, I will take the laptop back, before I switch from Slack.

PS
I tried Slamd and it just isn't Slackware.

Just an update.

I got the Slackware to use DMA by selecting the test26 kernel instead of bare.i when installing.