Many older motherboard (especially VIA) don't support DMA on the secondary channel (the second IDE connector on the motherboard). Some of them actually corrupt data on the secondary channel. This means if you have a 3rd or fourth hard disk you have to at least turn off DMA for the secondary channel. Maybe you can't use the secondary channel for hard disks at all.

When I was running Mandrake Linux 6.1 DMA would work fine on the primary channel IDE. When I went to use a HD on the secondary channel, the computer would pause, turn off the secondary channel DMA, and then work normally.


Quote Originally Posted by DNapalm
I had a similar problem with a VIA chipset, but the "knoppix nodma" worked for me.

Quote Originally Posted by preater
Hello.

First post!

I'm having problems booting from my Knoppix 3.1 CD - it always hangs during boot, specifically, at this point:

And we see nothing more. I'm using a board based on VIA 694X. Yes, I know my board is cheap, old and slow (UDMA66, really!).

Which is right at the beginning of the messages shown! I do have the Knoppix "cheatcodes" and have tried disabling hardware autodetection for everything I can, i.e. noapm noapic noagp nodma noscsi nousb, but it's made no difference at all. No damage is caused by this hang, and I can restart and boot using LILO without any problems. But I want my Knoppix!

I'd appreciate any advice about how I might go about fixing or just bypassing this problem.