Possible hardware problem?

[John B. Milton]

In article <130 at ecicrl.UUCP> clewis at ecicrl.UUCP (Chris Lewis) writes:
>My 3b1 is occasionally getting "F_HD_DMA set" panics.  2-3 a week.
>Was wondering whether this might be a stuck bit in the hardware somewhere
>that the driver gets confused with.  Does anybody know what it actually
>means, and whether it needs hardware service?

I believe this is a VERY rare problem. I saw it quite a few times on the 
machine I use for hardware hacking. After putting a fan pointing into the
power supply, which was not being ventilated very well, these errors went
away. I was very surprised to say the least. There is a little patch on the
P6 design to disable floppy interrupts while hard disk activity is going on.
The software folks wanted it, but it was never put into any released machines,
and as far as I can tell, is not supported in the current release of UNIX.

John
-- 
John Bly Milton IV, jbm at uncle.UUCP, n8emr!uncle!jbm at osu-cis.cis.ohio-state.edu
(614) h:294-4823, w:764-4272;  MS-DOS is a beautiful flower that smells bad!