How to turn off DMA when booting Puppy? (Solved)

Booting, installing, newbie
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wolle
Posts: 1
Joined: Fri 13 May 2005, 19:58
Location: Germany

How to turn off DMA when booting Puppy? (Solved)

#1 Post by wolle »

I got a problem booting PUPPY on an old DELL Notebook (Latitude CPi);
it seems, the harddisk is not accessible via DMA. Is there a means to give a cheatcode like "nodma" in KNOPPIX ?

Guest

#2 Post by Guest »

I've got a Dell Latitude CPi D300XT and have no probs with DMA, the biggest prob is the Evil NeoMagic graphics chip

nrormanw

Neomagic Problem

#3 Post by nrormanw »

Have you fixed the problem ? I have those graphic problems on another pc working with neographic chip ! Will these problems been solved with the final release 1.0.2 we are expecting in the near future ?

guest

dma issue

#4 Post by guest »

Has anyone solved this issue? Is there any way of turning off dma while booting from the Puppy CD(V1.06)?

Mark

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gnomen
Posts: 65
Joined: Mon 11 Jul 2005, 11:21
Location: NORWAY

#5 Post by gnomen »

You can probably turn off dma in the bios

Another solution that might work is kernel parameters at the boot promt. At the promt where you choose between boot options you can pass any parameters to the kernel as what you normally do there is choose between different strings of parameters from a file

I am not sure, but if you start passing parameters at the boot promt I think you override everything that is in the syslinux.cfg file. So in order for it to work it is possible that you have to pass not only the parameters necessary for your particular system, but also all parameters that are necessary in order to boot Puppy on any system. A pretty long string of parameters in other words

I guess the only way to find out is to try. I checked this in vmware and it works there.. At the boot promt try:

Code: Select all

vmlinuz ide=nodma root=/dev/ram0 initrd=image.gz
If you want to turn off acpi then add "acpi=off" to the string. If you want the pup-file you might have to add "PFILE=pup101-none-262144"
fake it until you make it

mark_l

Turning off DMA solved the problem

#6 Post by mark_l »

gnomen:

Thanks for your suggestion!! It worked!

I was able to work around a troublesome CDROM drive by turning off DMA. This allowed me to load Puppy up, then install it onto my hard drive. I even managed to install GRUB! All on an old Pentium MMX with 128 mb of RAM. I am using the system now to type out this reply (yes, even the old Rockwell modem still works).

Now I want to figure out how to replace the window manager with ICEWM.....

Again, thanks for your very helpful advice. Others with a CDROM that won't boot (I/O errors) should try this solution.

Mark L.

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Flash
Official Dog Handler
Posts: 13071
Joined: Wed 04 May 2005, 16:04
Location: Arizona USA

#7 Post by Flash »

Mark, would you tell us exactly what you entered and where? Thanks. :)

Mark_L

#8 Post by Mark_L »

Flash:

Sorry about that! I should have been a bit more precise in what I did to solve the issue.

I typed in the code
Code:
vmlinuz ide=nodma root=/dev/ram0 initrd=image.gz
as suggested by gnomen at the boot prompt that appears at the Puppy splash screen (v 1.06). This allowed my cdrom drive to copy user_cram into /. It seems that my cdrom is not compatible with DMA. Without the "noDMA" option, I was getting i/o errors and the system could not copy any files from the cdrom drive.

lickthefrog
Posts: 8
Joined: Wed 05 Apr 2006, 22:59

ide=nodma

#9 Post by lickthefrog »

took me quite a while to find how to alter the startup so that it is "ide=nodma".

finally, i got puppy on this weird computer.

thanks.

now it'll take me forever again to figure out how to burn the command into a livecd, if possible, so that i can have puppy on every computer in the lab i oversee. (though i'm looking into LTSP).

wish me luck.

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