[ale] Disabling Cache?

[Michael H. Warfield]

On Fri, 2005-07-08 at 15:10 -0400, Greg Freemyer wrote:
> I have an old machine that I need to use from time to time.  PIII 700MHz.

> It has a unique (within my office) configuration of hardware raid and
> scsi tape that I don't want to replicate right now.

> It has been unreliable recently and I just finished running Memtest on
> it.  It runs fine if I have cache disabled, but it runs poorly if I
> have cache enabled (via memtest).

> Is there a way to boot Linux with the cache disabled?  (I know it will
> be slow, but I just need to restore one tape.)

	If you are referring to the external CPU memory cache, then there
should be a setting under your BIOS setup chipset options to disable the
cache (sounds like you've got a bad cache chip - not an uncommon
occurrence).  I've run into this before where I've had to disable the
cache while diagnosing problems.  I would just jump into the BIOS setup
and it should be there under advanced settings or chipset settings or
something similar, depending on the setup that your BIOS has.

> I prefer to use SuSE, and I have SuSE boot CDs from 8.0 forward.

> Greg

	Mike
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