Messages in this thread |  | | Date | Sat, 22 Sep 2001 11:09:45 -0400 | From | Greg Ward <> | Subject | Re: "hde: timeout waiting for DMA": message gone, same behaviour |
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On 22 September 2001, David Grant said: > I'm not an expert user, just someone who's been trying feeble-ly to get > Linux working for the past 3 months on my new computer. I have a Promise > chip (PDC20265) and Via vt86c686b on my A7V133. I get these DMA timeout > errors when I am even trying to install Linux!
A-ha, so I do not struggle alone. That's comforting, in a way.
Most likely, you get DMA timeout errors when attempting to install Linux for the same reason as I get them when booting: the first time Linux tries to read the disk, it waits and waits and waits. Depending on your kernel version and which IDE interface you're using, it eventually gives up... or it locks up. (I had the lockup problem with kernel 2.4.2 and the suspect drive on my Promise IDE interface. On the VIA interface, it booted eventually after ~60 sec of timeout errors. Under 2.4.9, the kernel doesn't take as long to timeout, and it's not as noisy as it was under 2.4.2, but the underlying problem is still there: no DMA.)
BTW, you wouldn't happen to know which kernel version was in the Linux distros you attempted to install, would you? Not that it matters... 2.4.9 doesn't work for me, and I haven't heard anyone telling me to upgrade to the latest bleeding edge 2.4.10.preXX or 2.4.9acYY.
> [...] no version of Linux will > install. After the installer starts to install a few packages (sometimes > 10, sometimes 100), the installer halts, the hard disk light stays on, and > if I use CTRL-ALT-F4, I see these DMA timeout errors. The hard drive is > unresponsive unless I do a cold boot, as opossed to warm boot.
That sounds like problems I saw in the linux-kernel archive from a few months back: intermittent, not-always-there, takes-a-while-to-manifest DMA timeouts. The DMA timeout I'm experiencing is always there, 100% reliable, and manifests with the first attempt to read a sector from the disk (the hunt for partitions).
For the record, I'm starting to suspect either a bad cable or a bad drive. I've had positive reports from two people with the ASUS A7V motherboard and ATA/100 drives under Linux 2.4, so it's certainly possible. I just need to find someone with some redundant hardware that I can play with. Or get my hands on Seagate's diagnostic tool, which they don't make terribly easy to access if you don't use Windows. (Annoying irony: the only reason you need Windows is to run their program that writes a floppy disk image; you then boot that disk. But the image is embedded in the .exe file, and they don't seem to make the image available separately. ARGGGHHH!!!)
Greg -- Greg Ward - just another /P(erl|ython)/ hacker gward@python.net http://starship.python.net/~gward/ "I know a lot about art, but I don't know what I like!" - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
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