I noticed that this evening there's been an update to 2.6.14-2-686, so I installed it and tried again. No change, I still receive this error: dierdre# uname -a Linux dierdre 2.6.14-2-686 #1 Mon Nov 14 14:19:05 UTC 2005 i686 GNU/Linux ~ dierdre# hdparm -d 1 /dev/hda /dev/hda: setting using_dma to 1 (on) HDIO_SET_DMA failed: Operation not permitted using_dma = 0 (off)