How long has this setup worked for? Dma is most probably beeing enabled by default. If this setup has been stable; and stable for some time and the cdrom has been used for periods of time (say over 5 minutes or more) then the hardware supports dma. Some computer people will try to tell you to disable DMA in order to "fix" the problem. If the setup was working for a while; then DMA is unlikely to be the problem but it is considered sacrificial goat blood and usually means the person is completely stumped and is trying things to make the problem go away. Disabling dma on a cdrw isn't a good idea especially if you are burning at speeds >12x. On my Duron 750 768mb ram with 7200 rpm quantum drive; disabling DMA on the writer results in the burnproof beeing activated since I get a lot of buffer underruns due to the fact that the writer buffer is emptying constantly. Enabling dma allows the writer to burn easily and the fifo on cdrecord only empties to 90% of capacity which is safe and expected. Disabling DMA can greatly increase the cpu over head of using certain IDE devices and with burners this can result in buffer underruns. If the setup was stable; and even if disabling DMA fixes the problem; watch out because you might have just pushed the problem under the rug. If this kernel was in use for a while and was stable; then you could be dealing with hardware failure if nothing else has changed; although the upgrade to SID makes the diagnois tricky. Too often hardware failure can and does cause these problems; under Windows the DMA just g ets disabled silently Linux tells you it happens. Regards, Kerry. On Tue, May 28, 2002 at 03:36:07PM -0500, Cheryl Homiak wrote: > Yep, I still have a problem. > It happened again, as I was going into dosemu. > So I guess this will have to be looked at after all. > Just called my computer person. I suspect it's either the cdrom (hdd) or > something with the ide itself, as hdc functions in other environments > (zipspeak, DOS, using a debian rescue disk), also still opens and closes and > makes sounds like it's loading when I boot. > the person working on my computer wants to know whether DMA is being used or > trying to be used and wants me to try not using it; this would be in my kernel > compile, wouldn't it? > Thanks. > > > _______________________________________________ > Speakup mailing list > Speakup at braille.uwo.ca > http://speech.braille.uwo.ca/mailman/listinfo/speakup > -- Kerry Hoath: kerry at gotss.net kerry at gotss.eu.org or kerry at gotss.spice.net.au ICQ: 8226547 msn: kerry at gotss.net Yahoo: kerryhoath at yahoo.com.au
