Hi, I have a DELL Latitude LS400 laptop and I am a slackware 10.0 newbie (that is, I installed it for the first time 2 weeks ago, though I am reasonably cluey with Unix systems, and I have used RedHate before - until I got sick of it).

Every now and then when I boot, Slackware tries to mount the HD and it gives a DMA-timeout error, slowing boot down from 1 minute to about 5, and making me a very worried person. This laptop hasn't given me grief with Win2k so I don't think it's a hardware issue, but perhaps someone could help?

I don't even know what information you need to help troubleshoot, but ask and though shalt receive.

Oh, I should mention some things:

kernel 2.4.26
slackware 10.0
dell latitude LS400 P3 400MHz w/ neomagic 256av sound/video, 128mb ram, 6GB IBM HD, Intel 440BX mobo, ext3 formatted install partition, standard "full" slackware install.

you might wanna take a look at (and post) the hard drive's parameters... for example:

hdparm /dev/hda

hdparm -i /dev/hda


also, check (and post) the performance if you want (to compare later if you make changes):

hdparm -tT /dev/hda

it's good to run the test two or three times in a row to get an "average" feel...



one question: have you had linux on the laptop (before) without problems??