[SOLVED] hde: timeout waiting for DMA

[jason.ritzke]

Alright, I've tried this with every cheat code I know from other distros, in case there is one undocumented. No matter what I do, I cannot get TC to boot.  Every time I get:

hde: timeout waiting for DMA

Now, I only have 4 hdd's in this box, so I'm assuming hde is the cd?

Also, before you ask, the system cannot boot from a USB stick as an alternative.

Compaq Proliant ML330 G2.

Any advice would be appreciated. I'm confident that once I get this booting I can move on fairly quickly.

[curaga]

Try ide=nodma.

[Rich]

Hi Jason
The fact that it's complaining about hde suggests that you have 5 drives in your rig. Are
you running SCSI, a mix of SCSI and ide, or an extra IDE controller card? A little more
information about your hardware might aid in solving your problem. You can also try
checking your BIOS setup to see if you can turn off DMA to your drives. If you can, do it
to all drives just to see if you can boot and to make sure none of the other drives are
causing a problem. If it boots you can start re-enabling DMA on the drives one by one.

[jason.ritzke]

Intelligent reply, unfortunately something I've already tried.

I have tried (from previous posts for tinycore here and elsewhere):
nodma ide-core=nodma ide=nodma dma=off

On to the second reply:

Unfortunately, the bios of this system does not allow me to deactivate the DMA on the system, In fact, it doesn't give me many options on the drives themselves at all. It is a compaq server from the early 2000's, which means proprietary and annoying as hell. If I could get it to even boot a *nix distro from the HDD I would, but the system won't boot a kernel from the HDD at all.

[jason.ritzke]

With regards to your actual QUESTION regarding my system configuration, this is what it is:
2 1.4 ghz p3's
768 MB of ECC Signed ram
Onboard ATI Rage XL
Onboard LSI MegaRAID host raid controller
Onboard 10/100 ethernet (don't remember the manufacturer off the top of my head.
Drives are like this
On the RAID card:CH1mas=40gb Maxtor,CH2slv=empty,CH2mas=40gb Maxtor,CH2slv=empty
NOTE the raid drives are configured as spare pool only in the host raid bios. I'd turn it off completely if I could, but then I lose the channels
IDE:CH1mas=CD drive,CH1slv=empty,CH2mas=60gb seagate,CH2slv=40gb maxtor

I don't see what HDE could be except for the CD....
And no, I don't have a usb drive plugged in to the back :-)

[jason.ritzke]

I thought I should mention that the LSI MegaRAID (which is built in on a full length daughtercard with the graphics and the lan) is IDE RAID, not SCSI. There are no SCSI drives in the system.

[Rich]

Wow, you've got a lot going on there. If it was me I would first try a different CD drive
if I had one sitting around. Next, I would unplug anything not essential to boot, meaning
you want to lose hard drives, maybe disable the second proccessor if you can, in other
words simplify the system as much as possible and see if anything changes. I also saw
someone wrote that there is a setup disk for this model that is required to access certain
bios settings required to boot linux.

[tinypoodle]

Have you looked into booting over ethernet?

[Rich]

Have you tried the HP website? When you boot what rom version does it report?
According to HP the last revision is "4.04 (D10-11/01/2003) (9 Dec 2003)". One
of the fixes listed is "Issue where Linux could set the embedded IDE controller
to the wrong DMA speeds.". Also download Smartstart while you are there, it's
a CD iso for setting up the machine.

[jason.ritzke]

1. Bios is version D10 already.
2. System will run most livecd's (puppy, knoppix, etc.) incl. troublesome ones if you set acpi=off. I've only had boot problems with HDD installs (IE bios not liking my boot loader) and Tiny Core.
3. I did one better than unplugging things. I went into the bios and disabled every channel or controller other than the CD. Still no go. ALTHOUGH this time it was "hda: timeout waiting for DMA".

Long and short, the CD drive runs fine (diagnosis:runs other distros), this isn't the bios bug (diagnosis: version d10 installed) and this isn't the complexity of the system (I turned everything else off).

As for the HP website, they've yanked their debian netinst iso's. Aside from that, there is no real linux support. The disks in question are driver and kernel packs to help with install compatibility, but I think mostly they contain a driver for the MegaRAID when it's being used as a RAID controller instead of just a spare pool, as well as enterprise power management stuff.

I haven't really looked at netbooting tinycore. Any useful links? The only *nix I've ever PXE'd was CloneZilla Server.

[tinypoodle]

'tc-terminal-server' script is included in TC base.

[Rich]

Since you are still getting dma errors when you add ide=nodma that suggests that
the kernel does not see it. Dumb questioin but, did you type "tinycore ide=nodma"?
Without the name tinycore it may ignore it.

[jason.ritzke]

Yes, I typed "tinycore" first :-)

Tinypoodle, I might consider that. I guess I'd like to check all other options first, because that means I'd have to use up another box (or at least start a VM) unless you have a better idea up your sleeve that you just aren't sharin.

If anybody has any ideas as to why the kernel isn't taking my nodma command, they'd be awesome to hear.

[Rich]

Hi jason
I found something, ide=nodma is obsolete. Now that you've disabled everything and the
CD is drive hda try "tinycore ide-core.dma=0.0 libdata.dma=0" and see if that helps.

     [EDIT]: Corrected syntax from   ide_core   to   ide-core

[maro]

I'm not sure if your issue is similar to the one I described here. But my fairly old notebook produces a lot of DMA related error messages (AFAIK during the "autoscanning" that TC does during it's startup process) and the only way I managed to get it to boot from CD-ROM was by ejecting the CD-ROM manually after the boot loader was done (I've written about this in another post as well).

In the end that might not be a viable method for you. But if you could get at least to the point of having a 'dmesg' output you might be able to target your next steps a bit more precisely.