Wednesday, May 31, 2006

Trashing your Myth Box, day 6

I noticed that video was getting painfully choppy while recording a show this evening and did a little googling to see what could be responsible. It turns out only the boot partition and the DVD burner were set with DMA on, but not the partition where the recordings were. Continued googling explained the hdparm command, and I decided to hdparm -d1 /dev/hdc to change this. It worked, but I went overboard and did an hdparm -d1 /dev/hd? all while everything else was running. The terminal froze, Myth's frontend quit and would not restart, and when I rebooted the Dimension wouldn't recognize the OS.

For a change I actually looked things up before freaking too badly and making it worse. I did, however, boot a Knoppix CD and burn the largest downloads behind the install to a DVD in case I had to start over. This page explains a little of what I have ahead of me.

Edit: There are times when a little more thinking would have been smarter. In my zeal to make everything all better, I forgot that individual partitions don't need their own DMA settings.