Baslinux mailing list

[David Moberg <davidjmoberg AT gmail.com>]

Yes, this is more than a week old but I just saw it now.

On 2006-01-27, sindi keesan wrote:
> We have a drive (8GB) that has a DRQ problem in linux, with numerous hda
> status timeout error messages when I try to do a whole-drive search.  I
> posted the fix for this a couple of years ago:
> hdparm -i /dev/hda
> Look for some number (MMX?) in the results, in our case 16:
> hdparm -m16 /dev/hda   put into a startup file (rc in this case).
>
> BL3.40 did not appear to have hdparm.  I ran it from BL2 (chrooted) and it
> fixed the problem.  I was then able to search without these resets and I
> found /initrd/DOS/temp/usr/sbin/hdparm, and copied hdparm to /usr/sbin.
>
> Please put hdparm in 3.41 in /usr/sbin.  20K.

Why? Isn't the timeout just a warning message, or does it actually cause
problems? I thought hdparm was only useful for a buggy kernel/hardware
combination.

It may make more sense to rebuild busybox with the hdparm applet.
You can skip the DMA feature - BL has DMA off by default and it is
only useful if your hardware supports DMA and you need a faster
disk transfer.

> Or will the ext2 version be able to easily access it from /DOS/initrd/temp,
> at startup?

mount /dev/hd?? /DOS

Are you saying that the loop version does not?

David