Problem with drives, I think....

[joltz]

Hi Guys,

Up until 6 months ago I was using Linux Mandrake Community 10.1, linux ran fine no problems that time.

I desperately needed extra drive space so I reverted my linux drive back to NTFS for a short while for my XP partition.

 

So anyway after of not having used linux for about 6 months or so (i was to lazy to install it sooner) I decided to throw it bakc on as I missed it, but before I did i decided to look and see what other new linux distros were available, so i downloaded, suse 10, gentoo and linspire.

 

So to cut a long story short, those 3 distros above DID NOT install.

I have no idea why gentoo and linspire didnt, with suse i kept getting this error about dma not being assigned and some kind of error reading hda hdb.

 

So i decided to reinstall mandrake 10.1, ok abit outdated but i didnt really care about that and i couldnt b bothered redownloading another distro.

 

Mandrake 10.1 fully installed, however, now it refuses also to boot up, it takes a loooooong time to moiunt the first drive like 5 minutes and seems forever to mount the second, during that initial boot up before mounting the drives it seems to take 5 minutes to reach that point, mandrake gives me errors about DMA and something about failing to get a assigned address.

 

Im thinking something has changed on my system, and in a way i know it has with certain hardware, but the drives and mainboard/ide controller are the same.

Since my last use of linux, i had upgraded to 1gig ddr ram from 512mb sdram, i also upgraded to wireless network cards, and from a 64mb nvidia card to a 256mb riva card.

My mainboard is a ASUS socket 487 or 478??, p4 2500mhz.

 

Also, BIOS boot up shows my drives as UDMA active etc etc, even windows xp refuses to run them in dma mode even though I have updaded sis drivers etc.

Drives are in fine condition no bad sectors etc.

 

Anyone have any idea whats going on?

 

thanks for any assistance.

[arctic]

How did you reassign the free space for Mandriva/Mandrake after converting the linux partition to NTFS? Using Partitionmagic or some other tools? What partition layout do you have exactly on your drives? Are there any error messages in the /var/log folder that you could post here?

[ianw1974]

You could try pressing esc at bootloader and typing:

 

linux ide=nodma

 

and see if it boots ok?

[AussieJohn]

And also making sure that Harddrake is not activated in MCC -----------------> System ------------------> Enable or disable the system services .

 

 

 

Cheers. John.

[joltz]

Hi guys,

thanks for the quick replies, much appreciated.

 

Arctic, i used the installation cd's t setup my partitons, hda = ntfs which remained untouched, and hdb became my linux partition.

 

Ianw1974, your a legend, that worked and linux booted up in like a 20 seconds, is there anyway i can configure my boot up to run that command automatically for me?

 

AussieJohn, ill check that out now.

 

thanks guys!

[arctic]

Log in as root, open the lilo.conf file with an editor of your choice. Now change e.g.

 

image=/boot/vmlinuz

label="linux"

root=/dev/hda6

initrd=/boot/initrd.img

append="devfs=mount hdd=ide-scsi acpi=off"

read-only

 

to

 

image=/boot/vmlinuz

label="linux"

root=/dev/hda6

initrd=/boot/initrd.img

append="devfs=mount hdd=ide-scsi acpi=off ide=nodma'

read-only

 

Then save and exit. From a terminal, run

lilo -v

That's it. :)

 

Remember that the above lilo.conf is only a sample file and it might look different on your system.

[daniewicz]

joltz:

 

You should be aware that turning off DMA will reduce hard drive performance. While using no DMA is a viable work-around, you do have a hardware problem.

[joltz]

Yeah i know dma decreases performance, and i know somethings up cause even my xp partition wont load xp with dma enabled, even tho bios clearly says ultra dma is enabled when it boots, ive upgraded sis drivers etc but still no go in xp, obviously the problems also afecting linux, so it has to be hardware or bios.

[gfranken]

I've had problems installing Linux/Windows XP on systems when I've previously installed the other OS. I've had good luck with running a utility to zero out the MBR and Extended MBR sectors on the hard disk drive (together the first 63 sectors on the disk).

 

You can get MBRWizard here, (or you might find it on a Knoppix Live CD, I don't know). It exists in MS-Windows and Linux versions. I also have another utility resource to do this, which you may email me privately about at gfranken.at.charter.net.