"hde: timeout waiting for DMA": message gone, same behaviour

[Greg Ward]

Having problems with an ATA/100 drive under Linux 2.4.{2,9}.

drive: Seagate Barracuda IV 80 GB (ST380021A)
motherboard: ASUS A7V (VIA Apollo KT133 chipset)
ide0, ide1: VIA VT82C686A
ide2, ide3: Promise PDC20265 (these are the ATA/100 interfaces)
  (all four IDE interfaces are right on the motherboard)

I have tried connecting the drive to both ide0 and ide2, with both a
40-conductor and 80-conductor cable.

Under 2.4.2, there was a very lengthy delay at boot time with this
output:
  Partition check:
   hda:hda: timeout waiting for DMA
  ide_dmaproc: chipset supported ide_dma_timeout func only: 14
  hda: irq timeout: status=0x58 { DriveReady SeekComplete DataRequest }
  [...repeat 2 times...]
  hda: DMA disabled
  ide0: reset: success
   hda1

Eventually the system booted, but the drive was really slow (no DMA).
When I forced DMA on ("hdparm -d1 /dev/hda"), I got the same lengthy
sequence of output as I had at boot time, and eventually the kernel
turned DMA off again.

So far nothing new -- from the linux-kernel archive, I'm not the first
person to report this problem in early 2.4 kernels.

Under 2.4.9, the boot-time delay is not quite as long, but it's still
there.  And it's not nearly as noisy.  However, the end-result is the
same: DMA is disabled for this drive; it's a lot slower than an ATA/100
drive ought to be; if I force DMA back on, the first access to the drive
has another looong delay that results in the kernel turning DMA back
off.  Grumble.

This is a brand-new drive and brand-new cable.  The motherboard's only
about 9 months old.

So: is this in fact a kernel problem? or is it more likely to be a cable
problem, a motherboard problem, or a hard drive problem?

Thanks --

        Greg
-- 
Greg Ward - Linux geek                                  [e-mail]
http://starship.python.net/~gward/
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