How to enable DMA at boot time

[Clive Standbridge <nobody@i.love.spam>]

Following the tips in another thread, I have successfully used hdparm to enable DMA and to measure its improvement on my IDE hard disk.

Now I want to enable DMA at boot time. According to the kernel docs (ide.txt.gz and kernel-parameters.txt.gz) I should be able to do this with the kernel parameter ide0=dma, but it doesn't work. Am I doing something wrong, or is this not supported? If not, should I enable DMA with an hdparm command in an init script, or do something else?

I'm using kernel 2.4.18-k7 in Woody.
Motherboard: Micro-Star K7T Pro2-A (MS-6330)
Disk: Maxtor DiamondMax UDMA100.

Any help is appreciated.

-- 
Cheers,
Clive

PS apologies to anyone who has received this query twice. I've been meddling with my mail setup and I suspect this prevented my first attempt reaching the list.