Hardware (harddisk) failure (dma timeout error, dma_timer_expiry)

Wed, 04 Apr 2007 00:00:00 +0000

A while ago our server seems to have a hard disk failure as the following error messages kept coming up: hda: dma timeout error: […] hda: dma_timer_expiry: […] We exchanged the 20 GB HD against my old Mac’s 4.7 GB HD and reinstalled the system. A friend of mine tried the “broken” 20GB HD on a Windows system and said it works fine. We put it back as a secondary drive to our server and everything went OK for another 6 months until a similar message started appearing during booting: spurious 8259A interrupt: IRQ7 hdc: read_intr: status=0x59 {DriveReady SeekComplete DataRequest Error} hdc: read_intr: error=0x04 {DriveStatusError} ide1: reset: success and during shutdown: hdc: status timeout: status=0x80 hdc: drive not ready for command ide1: reset timed-out Additionally there were strange clicking sound appearing. And there is also a problem with spinning down the hard drive: it never did spin down anymore which made the server quite loud during the night. Since RedHat’s default 2.4.20 kernel doesn’t support laptop mode, we decided to switch the distro. I exhanged that drive for a 6 GB drive and newly installed Suse Linux 9.1. When I copied over the data from the 20 GB drive to the 6 GB drive there were three or four files that I couldn’t copy (IO failure). Now I wonder whether the 20 GB drive is really broken or not. From all symptoms it seems very likely yes. Although if its just DMA failure messages, they can be switched off by turning off DMA mode (given as boot parameters: ide=nodma noapic apm=off That makes obviously performance worse. DMA means Direct Memory Access and it means that data can be moved from the hard disk to another place (e.g. memory or another disk) without the CPU being involved (which makes it much faster and frees the CPU from unnecessary work.

Suse Linux 9.2 and encrypted DVD playback (xine, libdvdcss2, libxine, hdparm, DMA)

Sun, 12 Nov 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Although several linux video players (e.g. xine) do support playback of encrypted DVDs, Suse has crippled the libraries needed to do so. Thus none of the players/frontends included in Suse Linux 9.2 can play encrypted DVDs. What are encrypted DVDs? Essentially all commerical movies are released exclusively as encrypted DVDs. It is a pain in the ass, but actually can be cured. To play encrypted DVDs you need libdvdcss2. This is the famous hack, that was in the news and that obviously was not liked by the media industry. In some countries this software is illegal; in some others only the binaries are but the sourcecode is not. You can download a script that creates automatically an rpm for suse >= 9. Additionally you should replace or update the Suse Linux xinelib with the uncrippled version from Packman . Xine still opens a window that claims that it cannot play encrypted DVDs with a link to some site where you are supposed to read why not. This link is dead. Shame on you, Suse (or Novell); if you cripple your distro, please make sure that at least your explanatory links do work! Some DVD hardware is apparently additionally limited based on the country codes. The world has been split into eight regions and according to the will of the media industry the customer should only be allowed to watch DVDs released specifically for his region. There is a linux tool around with with you can switch your area code, but I don’t remember its name or URL as this was not necessary for my hardware.

DMA on Michael’s Domain

Hardware (harddisk) failure (dma timeout error, dma_timer_expiry)

Suse Linux 9.2 and encrypted DVD playback (xine, libdvdcss2, libxine, hdparm, DMA)