DMA won't work on a Highpoint 372

[Soupy]

DMA does not work on my onboard Highpoint 372 controller with an IBM 34GXP hard drive. I've successfully installed Gentoo 1.4rc1 with a stock 2.4.20-pre10 kernel by issuing the ide=nodma parameter to the kernel at boot time. Motherboard is an Epox 4G4A+ (i845G). My BIOS isn't the latest version, but Epox's docs don't mention an update to the HPT's BIOS in the newer BIOS version, so I don't think that'd help.

The drive is the only disk on the second channel; the first holds a 120G Maxtor which is my windows data drive and works fine in windows, at least. Optical drives are both hanging off of the ICH4 IDE controller, and I want them to stay there.

Yes, the Highpoint controllers suck, but I paid for it, so I insist on making it work. Options, as I see them:

1. Try the BIOS upgrade, but I doubt it'll help, and BIOS upgrades are bad under the if-it-aint-broke-don't-fix it philosophy, and the system works perfectly in XP.

2. Create an initrd system and try using Highpoint's latest drivers from their web site. Certainly a bit of work since Gentoo doesn't include any kind of mkinitrd system so I'd have to research it and create one from scratch.

Anyone have any experience or observations that might help? Or might this even be some kind of sad hardware-level issue wherein an IBM 34GXP just won't play nice with the Highpoint?

[TenPin]

I dunno about HighPoint 372 but I have a HighPoint 370 with an IBM 60GXP 20gb. I don't do anything with ide=nodma and just use the normal hdparm stuff and dma in UDMA100 works just fine.