some advice por favor

[Spot]

OK, first of all, I'm *not* hardware savvy in the least, so I'm not sure what to do here.
I'm assuming that I'm not even close to getting the full potential out of my motherboard, since I noticed this lil message in my bootup sequence today, and I'm not sure how to handle it:

ide: Assuming 33MHz system bus speed for PIO modes; override with idebus=xx

I don't believe this is correct for my motherboard, an FIC AZ11E http://www.fica.com/products/motherb...t462/AZ11E.stm
and hard drive, WD400BB
http://www.westerndigital.com/produc...s/wd400bb.html

I don't even pretend to know what PIIO modes are, nor what settings they should have

If someone who knows more about this could be of some help, I'd appreciate it.

System info:
FIC AZ11E mainboard, stock (KT133, VIA 686b)
AMD 1.1G Athlon
384 meg RAM
WD 7200 rpm 40G hdd
Voodoo 5
50x cd-rom
Mandrake 8.1/Win2k Pro

[JimH]

"Assuming 33MHz system bus speed" is refering to the speed of the PCI bus, not the DMA modes your hardware may support. PIO stands for "programmed I/O". If you are interested in what these are just do a search on "programmed I/O". Newer hard drives use DMA modes now by default not PIO modes. The message you see isn't saying your hard drive is not using DMA. If your hard drive was /dev/hda you can see if DMA is enabled with:

/sbin/hdparm /dev/hda

This must be run as root. Look at the manpage for hdparm for more info.

Jim H

[Spot]

Thanks for the advice, Jim. It's put my mind at ease for a while anyway =)