[PLUG] hard drive help

[kevin mudrick <kevin@furhurts.com>]

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Hey all,

I have a laptop and, if I don't specifically tell grub to turn
off dma with "ide=nodma", I get kernel errors like crazy, such as

hda: timeout waiting for DMA
ide_dmaproc: chipset supported ide_dma_timeout func only: 14
hda: status error: status=0x58 { DriveReady SeekComplete DataRequest }
hda: drive not ready for command

If I turn off dma, then drive reads seem to be really really slow.  The
laptop is a p166 with 80 megs of ram and a 2 gig ide hard drive.  When I
say slow, I mean something like "ls" in my home directory (with very few
files in it) can take several seconds to display on the screen.  I'm
running Red Hat 7.2 on this thing.  Problem seems to be the same for both
the stock kernel (2.4.7-10) and a hand-built 2.4.18.

I'm going to guess that my problem is that the hard drive is f'ed.  Is it
possible that it's the laptop's ide controller, and not the hard drive?
Is there anyway for me to test, other than to buy a new hard drive and, if
that one doesn't work, then I know that the controller is bad (and I will
have just wasted a bunch of money)?

Would running e2fsk -c on the drive partitions help, by marking any bad
blocks that might be, or does it seem like that's a totally different
situation?

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

- -- 
 (kevin mudrick)   (kevin@furhurts.com)   (www.bleachedwhale.com)
  pgp key available at http://www.furhurts.com/~darkspur/kevin_gpg.asc

 Despair: It's always darkest just before it goes pitch black.
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