HDD problem - hda: status timeout: status=0xd0 { Busy }

[ward at pong.be (Ward Vandewege)]

On Fri, Jun 23, 2006 at 07:01:51PM -0400, John Abreau wrote:
> Replacing the cable didn't help; it's still giving the error.
> 
> I found a message through google where someone says the error indicates
> that DMA got disabled.
> 
>     http://linux.derkeiler.com/Mailing-Lists/Kernel/2003-11/0679.html
> 
> hdparm -I showed
> 
>         DMA: mdma0 mdma1 mdma2 udma0 udma1 udma2 udma3 udma4 *udma5
>              Cycle time: min=120ns recommended=120ns
> 
> I tried
> 
>     sudo hdparm -d1 -X udma5 /dev/hda
> 
> to see what would happen; there was no change, the error still happens
> every 30 seconds. Output was as follows:
> 
>     sudo hdparm -d1 -X udma5 /dev/hda
> 
>     /dev/hda:
>      setting using_dma to 1 (on)
>      HDIO_SET_DMA failed: Operation not permitted
>      setting xfermode to 69 (UltraDMA mode5)
>      using_dma    =  0 (off)

OK; disk access must be horribly slow too, right? Try doing a 'find /' or
something - does it take forever?

Wait - didn't you say that you had a SATA controller? Your drives are being
recognized as /dev/hda rather than /dev/sda, so it must be set to PATA
emulation in the BIOS then? That could be the reason why you can't set DMA.

Alteratively, you don't have the proper driver for your SATA controller
loaded, that's why you can't enable DMA. Maybe you need a more recent kernel
(2.6.9 is not exactly state of the art), or maybe you need to load a module.

Ward.

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