Quote Originally Posted by preater
The VIA IDE saga lumbers on. My friend gave me an old motherboard (it's the same spec. as my problematic one) with the promise that he'd had DMA working on the secondary IDE channel no problems.
I know it's old, but I want to put this one finally to bed.

I couldn't fix it, but a friend has given me an Asus P3V4X. God bless Windoze gamers who always have to be on the cutting edge! The new motherboard is old -- same vintage as my previous one -- but rock-solid and very well made. The problem has melted away, no problems with secondary IDE channel DMA and/or Knoppix.

I s'pose the moral is "Don't buy crappy hardware".