[plug] Random troubleshooting (half upgraded knoppix).

[Cameron Patrick]

On Mon, Dec 15, 2003 at 02:11:46AM +0800, Pabs wrote:

| I get this during bootup:
| Sat Dec 13 20:27:23 2003: ******************************************************
| Sat Dec 13 20:27:23 2003: * Warning: The dma on your hard drive is turned off. *
| Sat Dec 13 20:27:23 2003: * This may really slow down the fsck process.        *
| Sat Dec 13 20:27:23 2003: ******************************************************
| What is dma, how does it make the hard drive faster, how do I turn it on?
| would it be in the bios? where should i look?

DMA stands for "Direct Memory Access" or some such - basically it means
that the hard drive (and IDE controller) writes (or reads) data directly
into (from) main memory, rather than the CPU feeding it a few bytes at a
time.  It can make maybe a 10x speed increase, depending on your drives,
CPU, etc.  Having DMA enabled is a Good Thing :-)

It /might/ be disabled in the BIOS, but more likely because the kernel
doesn't support it on your IDE controller or has been configured
conservatively to disable it by default (DMA support has been buggy on
some drives and controllers in the past).  If you could post any
IDE-related bits of dmesg that could be useful.

| when starting up all the filesystems in /etc/fstab are not mounted
| mount -a helps, but it used to do that all by itself. wtf is going on?

Perhaps /etc/init.d/mountall.sh is screwed up, or not getting called?

| my pon scripts stopped working when i upgraded ppp. external serial
| V90 modem -meastro companion. when starting up the RTS led on the modem is
| on, but an init 1 turns it off and and init 5 doesn't turn it back on. the
| rts led never used to turn on on bootup, and it doesn't do that under
| windows. any suggestions, or does anyone know of a way to step slowly
| through the init 1 procedure, so i can determine exactly what turns it
| off, or where in the boot procedure it is turned on?

No idea there, sorry :(  Perhaps something related to the setserial
package (e.g. /etc/init.d/setserial not being run, or configuring the
wrong thing)?

| When I do a halt/shutdown, init sez at the end of the sequence:
| INIT: no more processes left at this runlevel
| it used to just poweroff, can anyone shed some light?

That also sounds like an init-scripts problem.  Perhaps the symlinks in
/etc/rc0.d/, /etc/rcS.d/, /etc/rc1.d/ are dodgy?

| Damn, I can't wait for sarge, so I can get rid of knoppix.

It was released two weeks ago ... in some parallel universe where aj's
pronouncements bear some correlation with reality :-(  In the mean time
there are release critical bugs breeding and multiplying, a
debian-installer which sort-of half works on i386 and powerpc only,
antique versions of lots of software (being held up by bugs in
everything else)... *sigh*

Cameron.