Running Debian Unstable, Latest 2.6.14 kernel. After replacing the Motherboard with a Gigabyte GA-K8U and Athlon64 3200+ I cannot enable DMA on my primary drive.

The board has an ALi M5229 IDE controller, and I can see it in the lspci output. Still, if I try to hdparm -d1 /dev/hda, I get an error that the operation is not permitted.

Everything else works, which is a lot nicer than Windows, where I had to do a complete reinstall. Called MS to re-activate their Office by-product, and spent 10 minutes on hold and forwarded calls, only to be rejected by the automated system, forwarded again to a guy who eventually told me to call back in 30 minutes due to a system error of some sort.

Ben

Do you have support for your ide controller compiled in to the kernel or loaded as a module? If not, you will be unable to enable DMA (as you have discovered).

Well, lsmod reports the following ide related lines. The controller is the ALi M5229 for IDE devices, although there is also an SATA controller, not in use.

ide_disk 18784 7
ide_generic 1216 0 [permanent]
ide_core 131740 5 ide_cd,generic,alim15x3,ide_disk,ide_generic


Anybody know if the alim15x3 module is the right one for the M5229 chipset? The odd thing though is hdb, my home partition, is running with DMA enabled. I have flashed the bios on the Gigabyte board, changed IDE cables, checked jumpers and all that. Windows, finally running, has DMA enabled on both drives no problem, so I don't feel it's hardware related.

Ben