Unable to mount cdrom (DMA problem?)

[huggie]

I'm using the Universal Live CD to install on a PII-MMX 233. The computer hangs during the booting process right when it says "Attempting to mount CD: -/newmount/dev/cdroms/cdrom0". When I try option "ide=nodma" it'll boot. However, attempting to mke2fs after fdisk (which apparently seem to be fine) will give me the message "The device apparently does not exist; did you specify it correctly?" What can I do about it?

On the side note that perhaps will help clarify the problem is when I attempt to run Knoppix, it has problems related to DMA as well, the error message is as follows:

Enabling DMA accelration for: hdc
[CD-ROM 24X/AKQ]

Scanning for hard disk partition and creating /etc/fstab

/etc/init.d/rc.S:line 57: 4 Bus error $i Start

INIT: Cannot execute "/etc/init.d/xsession".

What should I do?

[jkt]

you can try to boot from knoppix with "knoppix 2" (or "knoppix26 2") to skip X startup, and also try to disable DMA ("hdc=nodma"?)...
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Česká dokumentace

[Bob P]

i'd double check the BIOS settings to assure that you don't have a misconfiguration that has hamstrung DMA on your machine. its also a possibility that your CDROM is old enough that it doesn't support DMA transfers. you might want to try using hdparm to specifically disable DMA transfers on that device (see the man page for hdparm and the -d and -X parameters). alternatively, you can just skip these methods and go right for the jugular, booting gentoo without IDE DMA support:

At the boot: prompt during startup,

[huggie]

I replaced CD-ROM and hard drive and the problems are gone.

[kimchi_sg]

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