I am a n00b. Installed OpenBSD3.9 from CD on a box with: motherboard: AK77-333 ram: 1GB chip: 1.7Ghz AMD disk: 300GB SeaGate ST3300831A
The DMA timeout issue has been dogging me. - Booted the SeaGate DiskWizard and slicked the drive (~22 hours!). - Replaced the IDE ribbon cable with a sexy armored affair from CompUSA. - Got into the BIOS and set primary master IDE to PIO 0, the lowest. - Also disabled UltraDMA in BIOS. - Used config(8) to set flags on wd0 to 0xff8, which I gather should choke throughput as much as possible(?) The system still chokes with a DMA timeout after ~30mins of heavy stuff (I was compiling /usr/ports/x11/gnome as something I knew would take forever). Is this a self-inflicted wound?: OpenBSD is the only partition on wd0, and I hurried through the partitioning, basically chunking the disk evenly across /, /usr, /var, and /usr/x11 per the installation pamphlet. Questions: a) Could naive partitioning on a fat IDE drive put enough latency into the system that a DMA timeout will inevitably happen? b) Should I punt and beg my wife for enough cash to replace the motherboard? c) Given C/H/S values of 36481, 255, and 63 what would be a reasonable partition scheme for a "home server" box? (Failing that, pointers to previous discussion would be great). Props for an excellent system, Chris
