On Wed, 18 Feb 2004, sambo wrote:
> After frying 2 fairly large drives during my installation attempts I am

hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm. 'frying' ? you mean like, destroyed?

> 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?

32bit is good. otherwise it's 16bit, which transfers slower.

> 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 *.*.

which drive? 500MB hdb ?

i suspect disk manager. read /usr/doc/Linux-HOWTOs/Large-Disk-HOWTO
(a quick trip to google 'ddo disk mananger linux' finds that #1 of
768 related items.


> Does Linux have it's own code for all devices ( it does not use BIOS )?

right, pretty much.


> So, is there a way to tell it to use PIO ( or even polling ), where
> would I find this code?


man hdparm
look at -c, -d, -m


--
William Hunt, Portland Oregon USA