It has certainly been interesting to follow how dma gets enabled, but that still leaves me quite puzzled. To recapitulate the, admittedly longwinded, description from my first post in the thread:
1) Dma is definitely off, because I type `no' when it asks whether I want it. 2) Initially the kernel (the default install cd kernel) can read and write the disk correctly, at least some of the time. I know this because disk/fdisk has correctly set up my partitions, both primary and secondary, as I can verify from FreeBSD, and disk/prep can read the disklabel which it wrote on an earlier install attempt. 3) Fmtarenas fails. 4) More puzzlingly, it seems to put the disk driver in a state where it can no longer even read the mbr. -- John Stalker School of Mathematics Trinity College Dublin tel +353 1 896 1983 fax +353 1 896 2282
