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Old 12-02-2003, 02:00 PM   #1
1Way
LQ Newbie
 
Registered: Dec 2003
Location: Northern IN & most of the midwest 5.5 days/week
Distribution: Suse pro 9.0
Posts: 2

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New install problems, no dma = slooow HD, no 3D support ATI 9800pro, help.


I'm a
Hello all, this is my first post on your forum, and it looks like a very well setup forum, I look forward to more from this site.

I’ve loaded Suse pro 9.0 CD roms a few times now (6 or so), after win XP, and w/a silicon image serial raid controller with 2 seagate 80’s striped as one, raid 0. It found my hard drives as one raid drive just fine since I had my diskette that I made for winXP with the motherboard drivers for the serial and raid drivers on it. No problem there.(!)

The main (first) problem is that the hard drive works very sloooow. It takes about 2.4 minuets to boot (and that is after the hardware boots)! I did some web surfing and found that it has to do with the DMA mode being shut off, in one article he said turning on DMA made his hard drive up to 50 times faster. My XP loads in about 30 seconds or less.

I have a brand new system, a

gigabyte 7nnxp, nvidia chipset w/AMD athlon 2500xp
1 gig of (overly fast) duel channel ram
onboard raid controller by silicon image (Sil 3112ACT144)
2 – 80 gig serial seagate hd’s
ATI All In Wonder 9800pro 128 MB ddr (<-- very nice, BUT SUSE doesn’t recognize it as such, something like a radeon 350 instead, AND it does NOT have 3D support, NO 3D I say, I can’t even see a single 3D game, arrrggg.)

(Of course all works great in Win XP.) (duck)

Here is how I started seeing the problem.
There is a place within Suse, KDE 3.? (latest I think), like system, then hardware, then hard drives, then it lists my two hard drives and a hard drive controller. You can select a single item, and then at the bottom would be a scroll selection box to choose which DMA mode you want! All 3 devices currant status all said they were set to no DMA. So I thought I could activate some DMA and fly (Right?, good?), but so far, every selection I’ve tried ends up making bootup crash, and one selection even crashed right away. Argggg.

Oh, I forgot to mention, I did NOT do anything with the (serial and/or raid) controller. (Opps maybe?) Should I have set the DMA to match what I select for the hard drives too? Hmmm, it’s just that I never heard of setting the DMA on a controller too, but the option is there, but the controller has perhaps half the DMA options. (Hmmm?)


So I am seeking three things.


1 - How do I properly enter into the command line a statement to shut off the DMA mode so that I can at least use the system again without reinstalling everything? Even in the boot window installer (lilo, I think?) it has a kernel option to turn off the DMA mode, it says enter the following:

ide=nodma

I enter that at the bottom where it says, boot options and a long blank box for entering text, and it makes no difference, when I watch the boot text lines it ends up setting the DMA mode which I last used within booted linux and then shortly after that all goes downhill very quickly. What am I doing wrong?

Am I supposed to enter the kernel option the statement AFTER making a command, like the following?

Linux ide=nodma

2 - How do I find out which DMA my system can use without destruction from within? ; ) So far I’ve tried using the following

- Ultra DMA 133
- Ultra DMA 16
- DMA on (default)

(There are about a handful more selections, some using “ultra” DMA, and others just DMA, also no DMA, etc.)

The last two at least let me continue to operate until I decided to shut down, AND it seemed to make hard drive tasks run faster too. But then booting becomes impossible. The first option, UDMA 133, it stopped everything immediately, ugly.

3 – Wrong video card found and it has NO 3D support, how do I get 3D support?

Help! I’ve scanned the manual but so much is assumed that you already know that it is of little use to me, like how to enter a command line or boot option for example, I don’t know how to do that correctly, I guess. I am a complete rookie at this linux stuff.

Help! Thanks.


Ps - Can you pause the text startup screen somehow? It goes by way too quickly to read.

Oh, I forgot to mention that I partitioned the two 80 gigers in the following way.

WinXP got 100 gig, which left an unpartioned area of the remainder (about 58 gigs) for Linux.

I loaded WinXP (twice) in that area and it’s very stable so far. (Hey, it was the first time I’ve built and software configured a complete system from scratch all by myself in about 5 years or so, ouch, so I was a bit rusty, .)

Then I installed SUSE using the same raid startup diskette for winxp, and had to boot that startup up twice to get the raid drives recognized and functioning right, and then loaded SUSE 9.0 on the remainder of the striped hard drive.

Suse automatically set up a seperate partition of 1 gig or so (?), something about it being an active swap area I think. I get no problems with the installs every time despite having hardware serial raid 0, pretty cool, I felt really fortunate since I saw some online help forum posts with problems loading linux on a hardware raid setup.

So the main problems are the DMA mode (hard drive slowness) and no 3D video support (incorrect video card found). The installs always automatically end up setting the DMA mode on the hard drive to OFF, and so naturally the hard drive tasks are really slow. BUMMER, and it always gets my vid card wrong and NO 3D.

Assistance is much appreciated!

Last edited by 1Way; 12-02-2003 at 02:50 PM.
 
Old 12-02-2003, 03:25 PM   #2
1Way
LQ Newbie
 
Registered: Dec 2003
Location: Northern IN & most of the midwest 5.5 days/week
Distribution: Suse pro 9.0
Posts: 2

Original Poster
Rep: Reputation: 0
Sorry all, my apologies, I should have done a better job scanning the internet, because I found that my video card has drivers for Linux. So please excuse the video portion of my request. This is all so new to me.

But, now that brings me a new question. I get online via my laptop (win98) machine, but want to use the drivers in my linux machine. Can I download the linux driver for my vid card into my laptop and then pkzip span disk it (or ? ) onto however many diskettes to deliver it to my tower linux system? No network nor internet capabilities between my laptop and linux system.

Thanks.

Last edited by 1Way; 12-02-2003 at 04:31 PM.
 
Old 12-02-2003, 08:45 PM   #3
netboy_541
Member
 
Registered: Jul 2003
Location: Hamilton, OH
Distribution: Redhat 9, SuSE 10.1 & 10.2, Kubuntu
Posts: 173

Rep: Reputation: 30
i don't know jack about suse, but I am pretty sure you can span the zips across disks and gzip should pick that up -- but I've never tried... I don't see why it wouldn't work..

with a box like that -- you oughta have the internet on that!! and at least cable!!
 
  


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