[tlug] Hardisk not playing along

[Ulrich Plate <plate@example.com>]

Earlier tonight I ripped out two HD drives totalling 4 GB with a Gentoo
1.2 installation spread over both and stuffed them into a different case
with a donated motherboard sporting an Athlon 600 Mhz, naively thinking
that this must be significantly better than the 166 Mhz Pentium MMX they
came from. I obviously need to recompile the whole shebang because the
CPU has changed, and I'm certainly not surprised that I can't boot from
the HD, but why would I be unable to boot from rescue CDs? And not just
the Gentoo CD, no, I've tried Mandrake, RedHat, SuSE, everything I found
lying around, and they all got stuck at the same point: Partition check.
Big badaboom. Frozen PC. 

Never mind that it took me half an hour before I realised that the
floppy drive was cancelled in the BIOS. After finally declaring to the
BIOS that yes, there is a floppy drive in the bay, I managed to boot
tomsrtbt, and that was the first one that - albeit hesitatingly - went
past this point, only to tell me that ide0 had an unexpected interrupt,
status 0x58, count=1, unknown partition table. Thent it went on to check
/dev/hdb (fine), continued booting and dropped me off at a login prompt.
Phew. 

So I went and fdisked /dev/hda to see what's going on, and it moans
about status=0x58 { DriveReady SeekComplete DataRequest } again. I quit
before anything bad happens, but do fdisk /dev/hda again just to check
once more, and lo! and behold, there's my partition table, neat and
clean, all three partitions, and no error message.

I've checked around, of course, Gentoo forum first, and apparently
people have all sorts of problems that can lead to this. To determine
which of the many reasons is the one for my problem requires more
experience than I have, so if anybody here had an idea about what's
going on I'd be on my way again. I'm guessing it's something to do with
DMA, I've had that sort of trouble before with the same drive, but it
vanished once I compiled the kernel accordingly. But why was I able to
boot from the Gentoo installation CD on the older PC, then? I've tried
switching DMA off in the BIOS already, but either I've disabled the
wrong option, or it just didn't help (and yes, you've guessed right, I
may not entirely know what I'm doing there). It's an Award BIOS, by the
way.

Any clues would be highly appreciated! Thanks and cheers,
Ulrich Plate

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