My work loaned my a Dell Inspiron 9300. The Gentoo install was straight forward starting with an i686 stage3. Remember to compile in SATA support into the kernel. Everything works fine with it except no DMA on the SATA harddrive and CDRW/DVD drive. This problem appears to be well known. Has anyone come across a fix?
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Which SATA drivers are you using? The true SATA drivers (libata) have DMA on and do not work any other way.
I’m using ata_piix. hdparm 6.1 says that DMA is only 16 bit on /dev/sda (which is the harddrive), and 16 bit on /dev/sr0 which is the CDRW device. hdparm returns HDIO_GETGEO as an ipnappropraite ioctl for the CDRW device.
I had a somewhat similar problem some time ago. My solution is
http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?p=1875619#1889792
I hope this helps.
The Inspiron 9300’s bios doesn’t allow for changing the SATA options.
hi, hdparm can’t go with SATA and SCSI because is only for IDE devices.
Perhaps ins in the kernel libsata(old) the drive can emulate in IDE /dev/hd*.
On this same model, I just did a stage 3 2005.0 install and with both genkernel and a manually configured kernel, after a reboot, the kernel doesn’t detect the hard drive, just the cdrom. libata is compiled into the kernel as well as support for the onboard controller card. Any suggestions?
Make sure SATA is compiled into the kernel and the ata_piix driver.
anyone found a fix yet, this is driving me crazy, 32 mb throughput from SATA!, getting over 50 on my ide drives in my server, that just isn’t right!!