This is a problem I have with this motherboard and a few things I've tried. When a kernel is configured with "IDEDMA_PCI_AUTO; Y", I'm unable to boot from it because of an (apparently) endlessly scrolling error...

"dma_timer_expiry:dma status == 0xff"

And this has been a problem for me because both Kubuntu AMD64 6.10 and Slackware 11 with huge64.s won't boot because of it, and I've wanted to try both, but it seems popular to set this this option to 'yes' even thought the information on the kernel option is pretty leaning on that it's likely to be 'no'.

So... I was wondering if there as any flag I could pass in the kernel that would disable this so I won't have to deal with recompiling a kernel before install.

My other option is to unplug my IDE hard drives (disabling them in BIOS doesn't seem to do it), but I don't want to do that, for hopefully obvious reasons.

I found what I'm looking for, the option...

ide=nodma

Which helped get past that hurdle in Ubuntu, but now my video card is being wholly uncooperative with the default drivers it selects. I'm starting to think I was better of with the nv 6200 with 'Turbocache' than this X700.