[vox-tech] not sure what to call it

[vox-tech@lists.lugod.org]

Patrick,

  DMA being the problem is very believable... the newer kernels default to
DMA on a while back that was off.  If the maxtor drive is not in the 
blacklist for bad drives the kernel will try to use DMA mode which 
the drive might not support.

- If you find that disabling DMA fixes the problem I would recommend
  trying to disable DMA on only the older second drive... and see if
  things still work.
    hdparm also comes with a test '-t' option which will do some
  read only tests, and can be used to find drives that don't support
  DMA... (basically if it works without DMA and you get errors with
  DMA the drive doesn't work).


  For what it's worth I'd also seen hard drives which when configured
to spin down after a period of activity which do not spin up again...
this particular problem locked windows 98, but Linux on the same 
machine would reset the IDE bus when the drive didn't respond and that
would wake the drive back up.

- If turning DMA off doesn't work, I would look into APM and APCI,
  see what settings the Mandrake kernel uses... maybe the newest
  releases settings don't mix well with your hardware.

    Good Luck,
      Mike

On Sat, Apr 13, 2002 at 02:46:08PM -0400, Patrick Stockton wrote:
> using the hdparm tool i've turned off udma on both hda and hdb.
> 
> I'll wait to see if it happens again.
> 
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Patrick Stockton" <codejnki@codejnki.com>
> To: <vox-tech@lists.lugod.org>
> Sent: Saturday, April 13, 2002 1:49 PM
> Subject: Re: [vox-tech] not sure what to call it
> 
> 
> > 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.
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > vox-tech mailing list
> > vox-tech@lists.lugod.org
> > http://lists.lugod.org/mailman/listinfo/vox-tech
> >
> 
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