Hi: I tried turning on DMA on my /dev/hda which is my only HDD, and the system locked. I used hdparm -d1 /dev/hda. The system also locks if I use the same command to turn on DMA on my /dev/hdc, which is my LiteON CDRW drive. This behavior was observed with SuSE 7.3 on a ASUS A7V MB with an Athlon 1200. I noticed the hdparm command also has the -X option, and -p, but I don't know if these are needed, or if they are anything I should be tinkering with. What is the right way to get DMA enabled? Oh, I have been passing ide=nodma to the kernel at boot because when Suse tries to turn on DMA their way (I forget how to tell 7.3 whether to use DMA or not except by using the boot option), well the system freezes when trying to do the partition check. Should this be so difficult? I have ide=nodma on the 8.1 machine too, it seems. I think it hangs during boot too if I don't use this. Is this box incapable of DMA? I have the DMA mode set to "4" in the BIOS. Not sure if Linux even cares about that. I have the 80 pin cable on the HDD, which I think means that should be able to do UDMA-66, and a normal cable on the CD-RW, which should be able to do UDMA-33, right? Thanks for comments. -- ____________________________________ Christopher R. Carlen Principal Laser/Optical Technologist Sandia National Laboratories CA USA crcarle@sandia.gov