Here's the situation:

I've been using Windows and Linux on two seperate HDDs, using a swapper so they were never plugged in at the same time. Due to heat problems, I needed to switch to a dual-boot system. I edited the grub.conf file manually to add Windows, and everythings working fine, except for this:

Activating swap partitions: /dev/hda3 swapon: No such device [FAILED]

Which is odd, since this seems to be the Windows HDD... This is what my partition check says:

hda: hda1
hdb: hdb1 hdb2 hdb3

This didn't seem to cause any problems until I tried to install some packages by booting from the Redhat CD. Since I just installed something off that CD yesterday, I assume I did something bad since then.

The message was appearing before I changed the grub.conf file.

One last thing, on bootup, I get this long series of messages:

hdb: dma_intr: status=0x51 {DriveReady SeekCompleteError }
hdb: dma_intr: error=0x84 {DriveStatusError BadCRC }

Does that about a dozen times, then says,

ide0: reset success

and moves on.

your drives aren't working well together on the same cable.
it's turning dma off for the second drive, hdb.
that doesn't have anything to do with your swap being moved.

you can try running the drives at a lower dma mode and see if that works.
like if they are both dma5 then try them at dma4 hdparm -X 68 -d 1
i think

Hmm, i guess you made the windows HDD the primary master (hda) and the Linux drive primary slave (hdb). So you need to modify the grub config file accordingly (which you seem to have done) as well as /etc/fstab. In fstab your swap entry should look like this:

/dev/hdb3 none swap sw

About the Seek- and CRC-errors you are getting... sorry, I cannot help you there but it sounds kind of bad to me.
Are you sure that the drive didn't get damaged while you had the heat problems?

I guess I should've posted this in the Newbie section, what's dma? Will this help the swap partition problem?

Would it work to have the Windows and DVD drive on one cable and Linux drive on the other one?

No. Redhat uses partition labels in the /etc/fstab for for everything except swap. So when the drive became hdb the OS could not find the swap partition because it was looking for it on hda.

DMA - Direct Memory Access. The transfer of data directly into memory without supervision of the processor

Quote:

Would it work to have the Windows and DVD drive on one cable and Linux drive on the other one?

Shouldn't matter but a few years ago some drives didn't play well together. I don't remember which ones they were.

Both are Western Digital 40gb, so that's not it, .

I think I'm just going to reformat and reinstall Linux, I didn't partition the drive at all, which I now realize is a bad idea, .

When I reinstall Linux I plan on reformatting the drive, and to eliminate the chance of any mishaps, I want to unplug the Windows drive when I do that, is there any way to make the Linux drive set itself up as "hdb" without another drive plugged in?

You would have to have the Linux harddrive jumpered as 'slave' without anotherdrive at the same cable that is 'master'. I think this will not work as you would have to jumper it as 'master' if you want to have it as the only HDD at the cable. But then it would be hda again and not hdb.

Also try editing your /etc/fstab before you reformat, I'm quite sure your problem lies there. Post it if you want and we'll try to help you with that.

Bump to try to get some more info on the DMA problem, .

reinstalling isn't going to fix any dma problems.
lots of drives won't work well together on the same cable, or cause a little
extra noise and will not work at full speed on a cable with another drive.
i see that all the time.
there are many dma modes and, and they are all way faster than pio modes.
i've seen several drives that would run fine at one dma mode, but i would
have to slow it down a mode or 2, if there was another drive on the cable.


to test the speed, it's hdparm -t /dev/hda
or for whatever drive. hdparm -X64 through -X70 sets the modern
dma modules -d0 turns dma off -d1 turnsit on.

for example, my current hard drive works fine at
/# hdparm -X68 /dev/hda
/dev/hda:
setting xfermode to 68 (UltraDMA mode4)
/# hdparm -t /dev/hda
/dev/hda:
Timing buffered disk reads: 64 MB in 1.35 seconds = 47.48 MB/sec
/# hdparm -X67 /dev/hda
/dev/hda:
setting xfermode to 67 (UltraDMA mode3)
/# hdparm -t /dev/hda
/dev/hda:
Timing buffered disk reads: 64 MB in 1.60 seconds = 39.90 MB/sec
/# hdparm -X66 /dev/hda
/dev/hda:
setting xfermode to 66 (UltraDMA mode2)
/# hdparm -t /dev/hda
/dev/hda:
Timing buffered disk reads: 64 MB in 2.11 seconds = 30.29 MB/sec
/#

/# hdparm -d0 /dev/hda
/dev/hda:
setting using_dma to 0 (off)
using_dma = 0 (off)
/# hdparm -t /dev/hda
/dev/hda:
Timing buffered disk reads: 64 MB in 9.29 seconds = 6.89 MB/sec
/#


better to have it lower than off.

Can't you set hdb as secondary master (2nd IDE Channel), i.e. hdc? Then you would run your drives on separate cables and avoid data collisions.

How do I make these changes permanent? I
did

But then when I restart, it just does the exact same thing. Is there a boot config file I need to change?

Also, how would I know if this is causing problems in Windows XP? Is there any way I can change it there?

in xp you can turn dma on and off, but you have to do registry hacks to change the
value.

there is a place in redhat to set those settings i think, but i just put them
at the end of /etc/rc.d/rc.local