*BSD News Article 87047


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From: spaceman@Glue.umd.edu (Richard Patrick Thomasson)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.netbsd.misc
Subject: DMA timeouts: swap problem??
Date: 19 Jan 1997 03:24:57 GMT
Organization: University of Maryland, College Park
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I recently installed a fresh system on a "new" disk.  I am running NetBSD
1.2 on a sun3, and everything is working fine, except that once in a while
I get a "DMA timeout while polling" on the SCSI bus, which crashes the
machine. I know that the problem isn't machine-specific; I've tried other
motherboards and the problem still happens once in a while.  It almost
always crashes when I boot from the miniroot. 

Note that this only happens when the "new" disk is the root disk.  When I
boot from my original hard disk, I can mount the "new" disk and work with
files on it without problems.  The only difference in the disks (despite
the model) is that the newer disk has a swap partition; the old one was
too small to have one, and since I have 24M of RAM it wasn't really
necessary for what I am doing.

Can anyone tell me why I am getting this error?  Is it just some
incompatibility with the disk I am using?  Could it be related to
swapping?

Thanks.

Patrick