"Drive not ready for command" error?

Hi,

I just installed Knoppix onto hard disk, to co-exist with Windows 98 on the other partition. Install went fine but the system hangs with the following text:

hda1 hda2 < hda5 hda6 >
ide late registration of driver
[many lines later]
hda: dma_timer_expiry dma status==0x20
hda: timeout waiting for dma
hda: __idle_dma_test_irq called while not waiting
hda: status error 0x58 {DriveReady SeekComplete DataRequest}
hda: drive not ready for command

At this point, the drive LED is lit continuously and I have to hit the reset button.

On rebooting, the system runs fsck, fails to complete, tells me
I need to manually fix the disk and keaves me at the root prompt.

At this point, if I remount /dev/hda all seems to be fine. Using
hdparm I can run disk tests etc, and I can run every program
I need to.

If I shut the system down and restart, I get back to the same
hang problem again.

BTW - hdparm tells me that DMA on the HDD is off. I don't see
any difference setting it on, nor does BIOS appear to affect things.

Any suggestions greatly received.

--mco

Did you try commenting out the lines under #enable DMA with hdparm in /etc/init.d/bootmisc.sh?

I suspect either a cabling/jumpering error (don't set the drives using cable select, set them to "slave" and "master": use the end connectors for the master or motherboard, the middle one for slave) or that the bios (take a look under automatic recognition if hard drives -- often the first "item" on the bios lists) isn't set to the device being DMA.

Windows (especially 9*) is very tolerant of cabling/jumpering errors, Linux uses hardware harder, so can't be.

Thanks

Commenting out the enabling of DMA in bootmisc.sh did the trick.

Up and running. Yay!

--mco