Kam Leo wrote: > > Only one IDE connector! And I thought my system was cheap. You really > have an economy motherboard. > > Seriously, the sharing of that single bus does affect operation of all > devices. Try turning off dma. If that solves your problem I recommend > that you replace the hard drive with an SATA one. > Oh, I have systems that cost more (because I want them to do more). This is a little barebones system that can physically hold at most two storage devices. There is no need for more than one IDE connector or two SATA connectors. Given what I want to do with it, I will never need more than those two drives in this system. At the same time, I didn't want the system to be physically larger than need be. So, this system is just right. Although I respect your seriousness and good intentions in offering your advice, I am convinced that having the hard drive and the optical drive on the same IDE bus cannot be the problem. There are several reasons for my belief: 1. There was no problem with this configuration when the hard drive had FC3 on it. FC3 booted and ran, no problems. 2. The optical drive is doing nothing when I try to boot. (For one thing, booting Linux from the hard drive does not involve trying to read or write to the optical drive. For another, there is no media in the optical drive to read from.) So, even though the optical drive is connected to the IDE channel, it is not using it. 3. The install process, during which both drives *are* active, worked fine, twice. The system always hangs at the same point in the boot process. If the problem were flaky hardware, the error would not be so reproducible. 4. If merely having two devices on the same IDE bus were enough to cause problems such as I am experiencing, there were be a lot more people complaining about similar (and other) problems all of the time. Although I am no expert when it comes to Linux, I have almost 30 years experience with computers, including some quality time up close and personal with system architecture and design (mostly for data networking gear, but it's the same issues and principles). I fully appreciate the fact that the communications performance on a shared bus may decline when there is more than one active user of the bus. However that is not the same thing as there being errors. Debbie
