>> I have two IDE hard drives - hda(WD 13GB) and hdb(WD 2GB), and also a CD
>> as hdd.
>
>Are you using an extremely broken IDE controller or something? The
>messages would seem to indicate the disk (or controller) can't handle
>being turned to 32-bit IO mode with DMA transfers.
I am not using broken IDE controller (ALI53xx). I never got such messages
when booting usual kernel (up to 2.2.9) including dma and 32bit mode enabled
by default. My second drive(hdb) is not cabable of DMA.
>
>> But if I proceed, and get to dialog with choice of Disk Druid and fdisk
and
>> choose Disk Druid - install tells me that partition table on hdb is
broken
>> and asks me whether to initialize it or not. And this is true - partition
>> table on hdb is really broken at this time (first 4 sectors are zeroes!)
>> However i can reinitialize it and proceed with installation and even
install
>> mandrake on hdb..
>
>If you hadn't tried to write to the disk, I'm quite sure nothing would
>have happened to the data.
I had not tried to write something - I just pressed buttons of install
program. I did not even launched
druid or fdisk - mbr was destroyed before this.
>Maybe it was a bad idea to set the disks to 32bit and dma without asking
>the user first; I've tried it on a lot of different systems (including a
>486 with a 340MB disk) without ever having similar problems, and there
>were no troubles reported in Mariner.
I guess that this is not dma or 32bit problem or kernel issue, something's
wrong with install..
Konstantin.
