Hi, i seem to have run into an annoying problem with a machine which has 3 promise ata/133 card the PDC20269 type. So far i have figured out the following all cards work fine when tested by themselves. All card work fine when tested with 1 other promise card in the machine. Any card will fail during boot (the card furthest down the pci bus) with the following eorros. (though the drives do report the correct drives they are plugged into) hdm: 490234752 sectors (251000 MB) w/7936KiB Cache, CHS=30515/255/63, UDMA(133) hdo: attached ide-disk driver. hdo: host protected area => 1 hdo: 490234752 sectors (251000 MB) w/7936KiB Cache, CHS=30515/255/63, UDMA(133) Partition check: /dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0: p1 p2 < p5 p6 > /dev/ide/host0/bus0/target1/lun0: p1 /dev/ide/host2/bus0/target0/lun0: p1 /dev/ide/host2/bus1/target0/lun0: p1 /dev/ide/host2/bus1/target1/lun0: p1 /dev/ide/host4/bus0/target0/lun0: unknown parition table /dev/ide/host4/bus1/target0/lun0: p1 /dev/ide/host6/bus0/target0/lun0: hdm: dma_intr: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error } hdm: dma_intr: error=0x84 { DriveStatusError BadCRC } hdm: dma_timer_expiry: dma status == 0x21 hdm: error waiting for DMA hdm: dma timeout retry: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error } hdm: dma timeout retry: error=0x84 { DriveStatusError BadCRC } blk: queue c03ac5f8, I/O limit 4095Mb (mask 0xffffffff) unknown partition table the errors continue for the other drive on the same controller. booting the kernel with the option ide=nodma will allow it to boot with no errors and function normally but without dma. When i manually turn on dma on each drive it works fine and returns no errors / produces no errors. The only problem with this is that 2 of the 3 cards fucntion normally the 3rd card run with dma disabled. This is being run under 2.4.27. Does anyone have an explenation of why this can happen ? thanks James -- Kernelnewbies: Help each other learn about the Linux kernel. Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/kernelnewbies/ FAQ: http://kernelnewbies.org/faq/