I'm having no luck setting my drives to dma mode and playing dvd movies is excruciatingly slow. Copying large files sends CPU usage to 100% I've read everything I could find in the sdb, tried finding info in the howto's and SuSEHelpCenter. Sorry for the length of this mail but I've tried to include enough info to be helpful. Here's the scoop, I've got 1 dvd player, one cdrw, and 2 Seagate Barracuda IV 80gb hard drives in a new machine. The dvd is from an older box but has been used to play movies in the past w/out problems. Currently using SuSE8.1 professional) My Drives are all IDE drives and the cdrw and dvd are ATAPI. On the first IDE cable I have Seagate Hard drive #1......./dev/hda, the dvd player....................../dev/dvd (a link to /dev/scd0) On the second IDE cable is Seagate HD #2..................../dev/hdc and the cdrw......................../dev/cdrom (a link to /dev/sr0) I've tried yast2 and hdparm to enable dma on the drives but when all is said and done everything stays as it was :-( (Yast reports "Device /dev/hdx: Cannot set DMA to value 1") hdparm -d1 /dev/hda gets the following result /dev/hda: setting using_dma to 1 (on) HDIO_SET_DMA failed: Operation not permitted using_dma = 0 (off) hdparm on the other devices gives similar results I'm guessing that I'm not being allowed to set dma mode because the optical devices are treated as scsi, but they won't work at all as /dev/hdb, /dev/hdd ------------------------DIAGNOSTICS FOLLOW----------------- Here is a bit of my /etc/fstab... /dev/hda5 /boot ext2 defaults 1 2 /dev/hdc5 / reiserfs defaults 1 1 /dev/cdrecorder /media/cdrecorder auto ro,noauto,user,exec 0 0 /dev/cdrom /media/cdrom auto ro,noauto,user,exec 0 0 /dev/dvd /media/dvd auto ro,noauto,user,exec 0 0 When I ran xine-check to diagnose my slow movie playing it reported: "[ hint ] Your DVD drive seems not to be attached via ATAPI. This might be due to the use of an ide-scsi emulation. If you really have a SCSI DVD drive, your SCSI controller is likely to do perfect DMA, so there's no reason to worry about this. However, if you're using ide-scsi, there is a chance that DMA is disabled for the DVD drive. Moreover, I don't know how to enable DMA in that case, so you probably have to live with some performance loss. (FIXME: check for /proc/ide, provide solution) press <enter> to continue..." Part of what hdparm reports follows: luna:/home/dh1 # /sbin/hdparm -I /dev/hda ATA device, with non-removable media Model Number: ST380021A ---------snip------------ Standards: Supported: 5 4 3 2 Likely used: 6 --------snip------------- Capabilities: LBA, IORDY(can be disabled) bytes avail on r/w long: 4 Queue depth: 1 Standby timer values: spec'd by Standard R/W multiple sector transfer: Max = 16 Current = 16 Recommended acoustic management value: 128, current value: 128 DMA: mdma0 mdma1 mdma2 udma0 udma1 udma2 udma3 udma4 *udma5 PIO: pio0 pio1 pio2 pio3 pio4 hdparm will give info for the cdrw and dvd if I call them /dev/hdd and /dev/hdb respectively but if they are named as they are shown in /etc/fstab (scsi devices sr0 and scd0) then hdparm refuses (as it doesn't support scsi?) ------------------------QUESTIONS-------------------- How can I set DMA for these 4 devices. BTW i use lilo for my boot loader, it was suggested that there might be a boot parameter (APPEND=...) that might help me. Thanks for reading this, -- dh Don't shop at GoogleGear.com!