dma drive access

scotty · 04-27-2003, 07:11 AM

Friends,

I used to have pretty good speed from my hd. Then I took out my
old pci video card and installed an Aopen agp nvidia based
card. The card works fine; however, I can not get dma access
on the primary master ide. I DO get it on the primary slave. Access
to hda is WAY slower. Booting takes longer because the system
waits awhile for dma then gives up and continues without it.

I have a Biostar m7mia MB. Maybe I should flash the bios?
Any suggestions on how to get dma back on the primary master??

Thanks!

-S

acid_kewpie · 04-27-2003, 07:16 AM

what does hdparm tell you?

scotty · 04-27-2003, 06:18 PM

Thanks for the reply!

It says 0 off. That is because at boot, when it cannot
access the drive with dma, it turns it off. I find that the same thing is happening in windows--set the drive to use dma, reboot to make it take effect and it comes up disabled. same as in Linux. Odd because it worked before the new video card was installed. It still works on the primary slave, but not the master. Bringing up eth0 is very SLOW to, but works. I'm stumper.

Thanks,

-S

jailbait · 04-27-2003, 08:40 PM

I suggest that you look through the bios settings and see if there is an IRQ conflict caused by installing the agp video card.

As a wild guess you could also check to see if the agp card uses a dma channel. If so the agp dma channel settings might conflict with the hard disk dma channel settings.

Aussie · 04-27-2003, 10:16 PM

I have a hdparm command in rc.local to switch on dma for my hard drive.

scotty · 04-28-2003, 04:13 PM

Thanks to all for the help!

It turns out that my ide cable was going bad. I replaced it
and I'm back in business!

Thanks again -s