Thanks for helpful replies. Randy McMurchy wrote: > There is a *warning* on the HDParm page in BLFS that says: > "Use with caution and make sure you know what you are doing."
> If you need to be asking the above questions to a support list, > I'm not sure you qualify to the "make sure you know what you are > doing" part of the warning. I've never used HDParm, but I wish > you the best of luck in your investigation. You are right. Ultimately I can afford to lose everything on this drive. But I'm not sure all the options for hdparm are so dangerous that only experts should ever use hdparm. And as a windows refugee who has spent many hours getting into linux and LFS it's hard to settle for running slower than windows. ken at linuxfromscratch.org wrote: > (i) is this a SATA drive ? If it is, you should be using libata (under > SCSI) in the kernel, and /dev/sda. This is something I'd been wondering about and is probably my real problem. Yes this is a SATA drive and that's all I have. My other linux distro does recognise it as /dev/sda. I think my BIOS is clever enough to handle it as an IDE which is why it works at all. > (ii) check your kernel config - build in the chipsets that are present > (both for ATA, and for SATA if relevant). If in doubt, build in *all* > the chipset-support options under ATA/ATAPI/ and similarly all the SATA > chipsets under scsi low-level drivers if you have SATA. Finally, ensure > that you select 'Use PCI DMA by default when available' under ATA/ATAPI/. # CONFIG_SCSI_SATA is not set I don't know how I missed this. I saw the others mentioned above and I'm pretty sure they are correct. > In general, hdparm -t (or -Tt) is safe and sometimes worthwhile to give > a quick overview. At present I get Timing cached reads: 2732 MB in 2.00 seconds = 1365.53 MB/sec Timing buffered disk reads: 10 MB in 3.04 seconds = 3.29 MB/sec So I'll compare it to what I get after I fix the kernel. I'll have to alter /etc/fstab - everything else should be OK I think? Thanks again David -- http://linuxfromscratch.org/mailman/listinfo/blfs-support FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/faq.html Unsubscribe: See the above information page
