[ILUG] IDE DMA problem

[Niall O Broin]

I've been trying to tune my IDE performance using hdparm but it refuses to
turn on DMA with the following error

bagend:~ # hdparm -d 1 /dev/hdd
 
/dev/hdd:
 setting using_dma to 1 (on)
 HDIO_SET_DMA failed: Operation not permitted
 using_dma    =  0 (off)
 
 
and I have the following in my dmesg output 

Uniform Multi-Platform E-IDE driver Revision: 6.20
ALI15X3: IDE controller on PCI bus 00 dev 78
ALI15X3: not 100% native mode: will probe irqs later
ALI15X3: simplex device:  DMA disabled
ide0: ALI15X3 Bus-Master DMA disabled (BIOS)
ALI15X3: simplex device:  DMA disabled
ide1: ALI15X3 Bus-Master DMA disabled (BIOS)
hda: IBM-DJNA-370910, ATA DISK drive
hdb: IOMEGA ZIP 100 ATAPI, ATAPI FLOPPY drive
hdc: CD-532E-B, ATAPI CDROM drive
hdd: IBM-DTTA-351680, ATA DISK drive
ide0 at 0x1f0-0x1f7,0x3f6 on irq 14
ide1 at 0x170-0x177,0x376 on irq 15
hda: IBM-DJNA-370910, 8693MB w/1966kB Cache, CHS=1108/255/63
hdd: IBM-DTTA-351680, 16124MB w/462kB Cache, CHS=32760/16/63 

I don't know what the DMA disabled (BIOS) is about as I have IDE Ultra DMA
set to AUTO (only other choice is off) and DMA/PIO setting for all the
drives set to AUTO also. I have also tried selecting various DMA/PIO
settings for the drives but I always get the  DMA disabled (BIOS) message.
The motherboard is an ASUS P5A with an AMD K6-III 450. Any hardware mavens
out there with all knowledge and wisdom ?



Regards,


Niall