Unable to set HD to UDMA 5

Pearl Louis pearl.louis at anu.edu.au
Tue Apr 2 00:52:19 EST 2002


Hi!

I just installed Mandrake 8.2 on my system.  Now I am unable to set my
hard-drive to Ultra DMA Mode 5.  I had Mandrake 8.1 on it before and it
was running in UDMA 5 fine.  There have been absolutely no hardware
changes in the last 6 months (and that was just a RAM upgrade anyway)
and as far as I know Win 98 SE is running fine in UDMA 5 mode in my
other partition.  Anyway, I first attempted to use a program called
drivetweak to change the settings on my hard-drive.  However when I put
the setting to UDMA 5, the output is: "DMA 

Error = 0 (No errors)
Interrupt mask : Unchanged
PIO mode : Not set
DMA status : Unchanged
I/O bit : Unchanged
Keeping settings mode : Unchanged
Read only mode : Unchanged
Read ahead mode : Unchanged
Error in setting nice group mode
Blockmode : Unchanged
Ignore write error mode : Unchanged
Keep features mode turning off
Defect Manager status : Not set
Advanced Power Control status : Unchanged
Media Status Notification status : Not set
Release IRQ mode : Not set
Error : Device can't set service irq mode
Reverting to power on defaults mode turning off
Write cache mode : Unchanged
Error : Device can't set it's prefetch count
Setup device with XFeR to UltraDMA mode 5
Door status : Not set
Error : Device can't turn off Seagate APS
Power mode : Unchanged

As you can see on line 4, the DMA mode is unchanged.

So, assuming that it might be a problem with drivetweak, I go back to
the good old command line and hdparm.

My command:

hdparm -d1 -X69 /dev/hda

The output:

/dev/hda:
setting using_dma to 1 (on)
setting xfermode to 69 (UltraDMA mode5)
using_dma = 1 (on) 

However, immediately after that I do a hdparm -i /dev/hda and get

DMA modes: mdma0 mdma1 mdma2 udma0 udma1 *udma2 udma3 udma4 udma5

ie. it is still running in UDMA mode 2.

Someone suggested that this is a sign that my hard-drive is about to go
down as before their HD went down hdparm -t kept on failing.  

My motherboard is an ASUS A7V133A and the hard-drive is a
IBM-DTLA-307030 running at 7200rpm (I mention that because I've heard of
recent problems with 7200rpm IBM HDs).  I only bought the system 1 year
ago so it's not old, and it's never given me any hardware problems
(besides that el cheapo network card that I couldn't get to work under
Linux, unstable nvidia drivers...well you get the idea, no *serious*
problems).

Any help would be much appreciated!  Especially if someone can confirm
that not being to change the settings in hdparm is a sign that my HD is
about to croak.  

Thanks
Pearl





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