[vox-tech] not sure what to call it

[Patrick Stockton]

Oh now this is an interesting idea, and HDB does happen to be a Maxtor drive
on the older side.  For as long as I've had this box HDB has been used as
the linux partition used in a dual boot situation.  Now that i've got the
laptop I put the system on HDA and on HDB I've got one large partition that
is mounted as /home

I just ran a quick fdisk on hdb to see what it says and it gave me an
interesting read out:

Disk /dev/hdb: 255 heads, 63 sectors, 875 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 bytes

   Device Boot    Start       End    Blocks   Id  System
/dev/hdb1   *         1       876   7034296+  83  Linux
Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary:
     phys=(875, 186, 63) should be (875, 254, 63)

I'm wondering what that exactly means...

I looked for the /etc/sysconfig/harddisks but didn't find it.  Any other
places I should look for DMA settings?  Possibly a jumper on the back?
----- Original Message -----
From: "Samuel Merritt" <snmerritt@ucdavis.edu>
To: <vox-tech@lists.lugod.org>
Sent: Saturday, April 13, 2002 12:59 PM
Subject: Re: [vox-tech] not sure what to call it

I had a similar problem once; it turned out to be my cheap Maxtor hard
drive that claimed to support DMA, but would hang every now and then.
The symptoms were that the system seemed to be running okay, but any
process that needed to use the disk for any reason (including being
swapped in) would hang. CTRL+ALT+DEL wouldn't work because it would try to
load /sbin/shutdown from disk, and hang. Also, the disk activity LED on
the front of my case was on solid when this happened.

If the symptoms persist, try disabling DMA on your hard disk(s) and see if
the crashes end. Mandrake uses /etc/sysconfig/harddisks for IDE disk
parameters.