Hello folks, I am still have a ways to go on learning the ins and outs of linux. I have been experimenting on a very old PC with Debian Jessie and also Knoppix. Knoppix rocks BTW. Not sure if this question is best in this forum but I will give it a shot. Where Debian fails and Knoppix succeeds is in the hard drive performance. The hardware is a built in IDE controller on the motherboard (VIA 82C686A) and there are 2 PATA hard drives, one runs pretty well under both OS's the other there is just a world of difference. With Debian I get lots of DMA errors and soft resets. As far as I can tell it is not a hardware prob as the hardware works correctly with WinXP and Knoppix. So I have been researching and tried everything I can imagine even built some kernels trying to duplicate the kernel configuration of knoppix with 4.26, 4.3, and 4.4 source still can't get it working with my regular linux installation. An lspci -v indicates pata_via is the module used for the controller in both Linux's. I don't see any special boot commands other than libata.force=noncq being used, and that does not result in the desired performance on the Debian install. I am taking about almost 2 times better performance with knoppix. Its a little hard for me to tell what the kernel is doing under knoppix since the hard drive / scsi subsystems are built-in on the kernel (and I don't know how to figure it out, lol)

Anyone have any suggestions? Thanks in advance.

J.