Hardware: Athlon64 3700+ MSI K8N Neo4-F Motherboard 1GB PC3200 Ram (memtest86+ says everythings fine. 2 successful tests) 1 120GB WD HD (Master; Secondary Controller) 16x16 Pacific Digital DVD-RW ( Slave; Secondary Controller) 2 15GB WD HD (One with linux one with windows. Windows = master, Linux = Slave. Both on primary controller) XFX Geforce 6600GT Video Card 450 Watt Power Supply Software: Fedora Core 3 x86_64 kernel-2.6.11-1.14_FC3 (the 2.6.11-1.27 kernel doesn't help either) kernel-module-ntfs-2.6.11-1.14_FC3-2.1.22-0.lvn.1.3 kernel-module-nvidia-2.6.11-1.14_FC3-1.0.7174-0.lvn.1.3 kernel-utils-2.4-13.1.49_FC3 kernel-2.6.9-1.667 (installed but not booted from) ---------------------------------------------------- Problem: This seems to happen to me with every distribution. The computer will either lock up or display a kernel panic. In redhat the kernel panics right at the beginning of the boot process, about where it detects hardware. The magic tonic to solve the problem is starting the kernel with ide=nodma in the case of redhat or whoever else to do that in the other distrobutions. As I was browsing through the nforce driver install at Nvidia's site I saw the the known issue section that some older distributions may not have support for DMA unless you modify the PCI tables in the amd74xx.c (I think that's the name) file in the kernel source. Well the blurb of information there gives absolutly no hint about the nforce4 motherboard and when checking the kernel source of the latest kernel I see no mention of nforce4. Does the kernel not yet support dma on nforce4 motherboards? Could it just be the ata controller on this board? Another problem I have run into involves ghost and dd. If I start up BartPE to run ghost 8.0 (I'm saving the image on a ntfs partition) it will not ghost the linux hard driver. It starts and then BSODs BartPE. The same happens using the ext2/3 windows file system drivers with windows. If I try and read a file from the drive it BSODs (ntfs linux driver reads from my ntfs drives just fine). dd on the other hand when being run from Helix 1.6 will hang right after starting. It basically will freeze the whole system. The if parameter is set to the linux hd and the of paremeter is set to a Samba share on another computer. DMA works fine under WindowsXP and I do not have any problems unless I install Nvidia's SW IDE Drivers (The system will automatically BSOD and reset before getting past the windows start screen... even in safe mode after a while). I am unsure what to do and I am rather apprehensive about sending in my motherboard for a replacement (although I might just have to if it turns out to be hardware related). I'm fine manually patching the kernel sourcecode if someone can point towards decent enough instructions. If there is a modified unofficial kernel (preferably in a binary format) that fixes this problem I'd be ok with that too. Thanks for any help, Nathaniel Husted
