After frying 2 fairly large drives during my installation attempts I am
left with 500mb quantum drive ( at least the computer was heaven sent
after not being able to find one fully working 486 board in the pile,
just not sure how far will 32Mb will go).
After removing the Disk managers DDO ( which confused linux,
successfully I hope, with partition magic ) I was unable to boot even
DOS on it.( 524x32 or 1049x16 in BIOS)
I decided to put another DOS 1G drive in as primary ( with DDO ) only
to uncover some hardware incompatibility in this drive.
Incidentally the 1G drive has a dip setting for master with non-ATA
compatible slave but it doesn't help.

At BOOT the DDO states that (for second drive) :
Host Transfer = 32 Bit (CHS) *OK*

32 bits somehow that seams strange , is that the function of the PCI IDE?

When Linux boots/loads it says DMA timeout on the drive and the whole
lot of can't read super-block, this block, that block *.*.

Does Linux have it's own code for all devices ( it does not use BIOS )?
So, is there a way to tell it to use PIO ( or even polling ), where
would I find this code?


Thanks Sam.