Re: FYI: DMA/33 and kernels
On Sun, 18 Oct 1998 bernie@brainiac.com wrote:
> I have had two Quantum drives basically eat themselves (the sound they make is like an old window shade spring suddenly snapping back with a 'whirr' noise). They have been UDMA drives, running on an Asus MB with a K6-233, and Debian 2.0 running the default kernel. So I am very much interested in what you report!
>
> In addition to the hdparm params you suggest, I wonder if you would be kind enough to list some of the BIOS features that are also suspects in this UDMA conundrum? In both cases that I mentioned above I had turned off the 'auto' UDMA detect, so that the drives were being recognized as just LBA, Mode 4 (is that right?, my memory is foggy here...).
>
Ok, it turns out that I had to disable EVERY IDE enhancement in the BIOS
concerning the built-in IDE interface. This includes things like burst
modes, etc. Also, turn off almost all drive enhancements via hdparm ...
things like -A0 -a0 -m0 -W0 etc. One ABSOLUTELY REQUIRED change was to
turn prefetch off in the BIOS. Having this on resulted in severe
filesystem corruption with linux. That is the the SiS chipset, Award BIOS,
M-Tech mobo with built-in IDE controller. I could probably do MUCH better
with a Promise UDMA PCI controller on the bus and disabling the on-board
controller.
George Bonser
The Linux "We're never going out of business" sale at an FTP site near you!
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