Gordon Henderson wrote:

On Tue, 17 May 2005, Jay Strauss wrote:

quoted

I'm very unfamiliar with options for speeding up hard drive access.
What might Knoppix be setting (and how would I look for it), that it's
getting 100% better drive performance than a plain jane Sarge install?

The usual culprit is DMA. (Or lack of it in your case)

What does

  hdparm /dev/hda

give under each OS?

You can use hdparm to enable DMA, but this doesn't always work - the real
solution is to work out what type of IDE controller you have and make sure
it's compiled into your kernel.

Gordon

thanks Gordon, below are the outputs from both trials.  How would I go 
about finding out the IDE controller I have?


Sarge:~# hdparm /dev/hda

/dev/hda:
  multcount    =  0 (off)
  IO_support   =  0 (default 16-bit)
  unmaskirq    =  0 (off)
  using_dma    =  1 (on)
  keepsettings =  0 (off)
  readonly     =  0 (off)
  readahead    = 256 (on)
  geometry     = 19457/255/63, sectors = 312581808, start = 0

knoppix

/dev/hda:
  multcount    = 16 (on)
  IO_support   =  0 (default 16-bit)
  unmaskirq    =  0 (off)
  using_dma    =  1 (on)
  keepsettings =  0 (off)
  readonly     =  0 (off)
  readahead    =  8 (on)
  geometry     = 19457/255/63, sectors = 312581808, start = 0