I recently purcahsed a Dell 4700, which has a Pentium 4, 2.8Ghz hyperthreaded CPU, 1GB of RAM and 40GB Serial ATA Dirve, and I have added in a Seagate ATA drive onto the PATA interface.

The Chipset is an Intel 915g and I believe it is using the ICH6 chipset for the ATA interfce.

I am running Debian Sarge on this machine which was installed clean. My home Directory is on the Seagate ATA drive which when tested with HDPARM -t /dev/hda gives em throughput og 8MB a second.

As you can guess performance is slow when running more then a few things.
I have tried a few different Kernels, all installed using APT_GET.

I have been googling around for answers, but haven't found anything that really relates to the questions I have.

DMA is truned off and it looks like the kenrel is loading IDE-GENERIC and PIIX.

My problems are :

1. I can not get DMA turned on, I tried using HDPARM -d1 -X udma /de/hda
but I get an error that DMA can not be turned on, which I think is because it is using IDE_GENERIC right now.

2. I'm not sure which module to load for the ATA chipset.

How does the Kernel decide whcih modules to load?

Where do I find that list of modules it loads so that I can remove the IDE_GENERIC entry.

How do I figure out which module I should be using for a particular chipset?

Thank You all for your help.

Frankyboy4

Have you tried "hdparm -d1 /dev/hda" without the -X? Do these debian kernels have /proc/config.gz support? (I've never worked with pre-compiled kernels really, always been a fan of rolling my own).

Yes I tried the hdparm -d1 /dev/hda with the same results.

I don't know about the config.gz. I'm still learning the ropes with linux and Debian now.

Thanks

Frankyboy4

I booted into recovery mode withour mounting any partitions from the ata drive and using modconf was still unnable to get DAM turned on.

I also found that it is loading a driver called ata_piix which may be the correct driver for my chipset, not 100% sure.

Any help is greatly appreciated.

Thanks

Frankyboy4

How's the performance on the SATA disks?

I have a new 4700 and hdparm on the ATA disk reports 22.5 MB/sec (and 56 MB/sec on the SATA disks).
DMA is on. I also couldn't get DMA on when I was using a 2.4.27 kernel with the BIOS in SATA combination mode. Now with 2.6.11 with normal mode, everything ios much faster.

See my post here:

http://forums.us.dell.com/supportfor...essage.id=6043

Peter