DMA related disc issues

[moron]

On October 5, 2003 01:58 pm, Janet Sullivan wrote:
> Before you added the new drive, was the CD-ROM sharing the primary IDE
> bus with the main drive, or was it on the secondary channel?  I'd guess
> it used to be on the secondary channel?  If you disconnect the CD-ROM
> and enable DMA, do you have any problems?  Do you have ATA66 cables to
> all devices?

Howdy.  The CD drive is a slave on the main IDE bus (where it has been since 
the box was initially setup).  The new second drive is hanging off of the 
second IDE bus, configured as a master.  The cables are all ATA100 (well, I 
am assuming that's the case with the Seagate since it came with the drive, it 
looks ATA66/100 anyway).  

Here's what dmesg shows for them:

ad0: 39205MB <Maxtor 6E040L0> [79656/16/63] at ata0-master PIO4
ad2: 76319MB <ST380013A> [155061/16/63] at ata1-master PIO4

The part that I find strange is that everything worked perfectly until the 
addition of the second drive (though I cannot absolutely pin it on that since 
I did update the OS as well around that time).

I don't have physical access to the machine until Monday so I will try 
disconnecting the CD drive, re-enabling DMA and see if that makes any 
difference.  I sucks not knowing though as I don't much like losing email and 
risking database integrity on a "wiggle it and see" type test.  It does not 
lock up right away - so far it has taken hours at least before problems creep 
up.

=)

The server itself was bought and built from donations so the reason I never 
moved the CDROM drive to its own bus was monetary (it was what we could 
afford at the time).  That said, with DMA enabled it smoked for what we need 
(your typical web server / mailing list community site). 

Thanks for the feedback.

Cheers

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