[ILUG] disabling IRQ and SATA - Not Solved

[kevin]

Tried a few things last night, results were very confusing.

Loaded Mandrake 10.0 with 2.4 kernel and got a functioning system but on boot 
up it was throwing a load of SATA errors. I installed the 2.6 kernel 
alongside the 2.4 kernel from the rpm and the system refused to boot...even 
into the 2.4.

I removed the bttv card, included acpi=off noapic, no luck. I tried installing 
fedora core 2, which I have used on this machine before, the install froze at 
the formatting stage.

Finally reinstalled Mandrake 10 (2.4) from scatch, installed fine, disk 
formatted fine and seemed to work OK for 1/2 hour. Then I rebooted and it 
came back with the "disabling IRQ" errors scrolling across the screen again. 
I don't understand why it worked and then threw the error on reboot?? Also 
the disk performance is terrible (hdparm results are 380M/S and 2M/S) hdparm 
-d1 brings this up to 380 and 38 but it quickly seems to turn the DMA back 
off again and drops back to the old values.

The hardware seems fine as the Win98 partition loads and runs great and I ran 
it for a few hours to make sure. 

Any ideas appreciated.

Kevin.


On Thursday 5 August 2004 13:25, kevin wrote:
In the past I have used both the standard nv diver and the driver from nvidia
on this machine. Both worked fine except for when switching to a non graphics
run level ie runlevel 1 the screen was messed up with the nvidia driver, the
nv driver never showed this problem. However on runlevel 5 it worked fine and
opening a terminal from there was also fine so I could do command line stuff
from there. I haven't loaded the nvidia driver since the problem started and
have been using the standard nv driver. I will try noapic tonight and see
what happens.

Thanks

Kevin.

On Thursday 5 August 2004 12:26, Paul Jakma wrote:

On Thu, 5 Aug 2004, kevin wrote:
> The video card is based on nvidia geforce 4, I think it says
> something like MX400 or MX440.

And you use the nvidia drivers?

If so, disable the nvidia drivers - at least, prevent the nvidia
kernel modules from being loaded - and reboot. Does the problem go
away?

If not, reboot with 'noapic' on the kernel command line, does the
problem go away?

> 1. Remove both drives from IDE channel 1, switch off channel 1 in the bios.
> 2. Add a new SATA card in one of the pci slots plus a sata drive
>
> 3. Also added a BTTV card in a PCI slot, this had been in the
> machine about 6 months ago but was taken out.

seems reasonably sane hardware, all with decent drivers, apart from
the Nvidia..

> Kevin.

regards,
--
Paul Jakma	paul at clubi.ie	paul at jakma.org	Key ID: 64A2FF6A
Fortune:
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