Lately I'm having some serious problems with 20GB HD in P200MMX
computer with PAM0057I motherboard.
After a while I've figured out, that Bios has huge impact on
the working status of this drive WDC WD205BA.
The drive is working without any problems on Abit BP6 board.
But on the PAM0057I board I almost couldn't use it.
With 2.2.14pre3 kernel I couldn't boot even when all hdparm
parameters are dissabled (=0).
with 2.2.14pre11 I could at least boot this machine from this
drive. On the other side - when this drive is on /dev/hdc position
I could use it even with DMA (this is imposible when this
drive is primary master)
I discovered that DMA works on this drive, when there is "None"
is the drive detection field in Bios. When there is "Auto"
DMA doesn't work (however it works with smaller drives 2.5GB & 10GB)
Of course I couldn't set "None" to the primary master....
So this drives runs with halve of speed without DMA.
Then I've also tryied to flash the Ami bios which
I've found for this computer - with this Bios there
were really no problems with drives - everything was running
at least twice as fast - HD was giving 16MB/s on P200MMX
2.5 year old computer (BP6 gives me 19MB/s).
The only problem was that serial ports and floppy drives
were not working.
major difference was in this line:
ide0: BM-DMA at 0xf000-0xf007, BIOS settings: hda:DMA, hdb:pio
While with older bios there were just pio modes.
So at least 2.2.XX series are heavily dependent on Bios.
Is there something better with 2.3.X kernels ???
Is there a way I could achieve that marvelous performace
with linux and without bios ???
--
Hi! I'm a .signature virus! Copy me into your ~/.signature to help me
spread!
Zdenek Kabelac http://i.am/kabi/ kabi@i.am {debian.org; fi.muni.cz}
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