dma timer expiry

I recently added another IDE drive to my system with the intent of moving the home directory to it so I can get some isolation from my system disk. Although the new drive is recognized, I end up with several messages about "dma timer expiry". After about 4 retries, the boot continues and the login prompt appears. I've found that if I remove the new drive and change the bios to indicate that it is not there, all is well. Also, if I boot from the CD, I don't get these messages and the drive is properly seen. I suspect if I were to reinstall Knoppix, everything would be set up fine, but I have spent a fair amount of time configuring and updating my system to simply trash it and restart. Does anyone have any ideas what might be causing this? I"m suspecting a configuration file of some sort, but being new to Linux, I can't seem to find the answer. Any help would be most appreciated. Thanks.