Hangs when scanning harddisks partitions

[Jaster]

When booting Knoppix 3.4 from CD and after detecting hardware, process hangs when "scanning harddisks partitions and creating /etc/fstab".
It's and old Pentium II at 350MHz with 128 MB RAM.

I've tested CD in other computers, including another PII and a PIV Laptop and Knoppix boots and works perfectly.
What can be the problem here?
Thanks for your attention!!

Oh, I forgot it...Knoppix 3.2 works ok in this rebel machine...

[Lithium]

When booting Knoppix 3.4 from CD and after detecting hardware, process hangs when "scanning harddisks partitions and creating /etc/fstab".
It's and old Pentium II at 350MHz with 128 MB RAM.

i am also having that problem with the system freezing during the scan. i'm running on a Celeron 366MHz, 112MB RAM.
(from dmesg)
hda: QUANTUM FIREBALL EX12.7A, ATA DISK drive
hdb: MAXTOR 2F020J0, ATA DISK drive
hdc: ATAPI CD-ROM DRIVE 36X MAXIMUM, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM drive

only solution that i thought of was to turn off my DMA at the "boot:" prompt with "knoppix nodma". this worked for me, although i haven't a clue why. i never bothered looking up any information to see if there were any DMA problems with my specific drives or not. what drives do you have in your machine? try using "nodma", and see if there's any difference. good luck.

[Jaster]

I booted with cheatcode nodma and it goes perfectly. Thank you!!



I think that the problem is dma acceleration in my drives, because Knoppix 3.2 that worked without problems has dma acceleration turned off by default. I don't know if all drives have the same problem or if it's only the hard drive or maybe somehow about the motherboard...As I said it's and old machine...I'll investigate about this.

My drives are:
hda:MAXTOR ATA DISK DRIVE (sorry, I don't remember the serial number)
hdb: ATAPI LG CDROM DRIVE x52
hdc: ATAPI LITEON CDR/RW DRIVE

Thank you again!

[Jaster]

As I suspected, it's my BIOS. Too old version for that ATA drive (prior to 199. I can survive booting with nodma options...
C ya!