I am hoping someone can shed some light on this for me!!

I am trying to turn on DMA on my hd, I know the command required to do it but,

It doesnt work!
I have a Maxtor 6L040J2 40Gb 7200 rpm drive.

When I try to activate DMA I get this error message:
HDIO_SET_DMA failed: Operation not permitted

and the DMA setting remains off.

My motherboard is a Soltek SL-75DRV4 well capable of handling DMA.
Bios is: Award v6.0

I really want to turn on DMA in the hopes it will increase my 6.7Mb/sec transfer rate!! (which really sucks)

any help would be much appreciated!
ask your mom ask everyone if they have any idea!

In the mean time mind sharing the command to turn on DMA with the rest of us

It's part of hdparm, check the man, I am guessing it's in there.

And d00d, is this a double post, or am I just seeing double?

sorry about all the posts!
I really want to sort this thing out!

yeah sorry the command is
hdparm -d1 /dev/your hard drive

this turns on dma
sorry again guys!

this is the same problem im having with my system...wtf is goin on...ive never seen so many people have this problem.

Mabye there is something in your BIOS, or mabye a weird jumper on the disk to not allow this to turn on?

Do you run any other operating systems, see if you can turn DMA on in them?

i have it enabled in my BIOS also when i go into windows its enabled as UDMA5. when i try to transfer files over my network or when i unrar or try to burn a cd my system encounters extreem lag. It will lock up for 5 seconds then resume, then lock up, then resume. This is how i know its a linux problem. I have a top of the line western digital special edition with an 8 meg buffer. I dont have this issue in windows.

I am slowly getting to the root of this problem!

If you are using a motherboard with a viaVT8233A south bridge chip, then goto http://www.viaarena.com/?PageID=87#ide and you can download the fix.
Or even better download a new kernel version above 2.5.2
that should fix it!
enjoy the experience! hah