I have a couple of problems which are probably related - can
anybody shed some light on them?  I am running NetBSD 1.5
BETA2, on a K6/2-550 (Aladdin MB).

1. The drive access light is on when the system boots, and
remains on until the CDROM [samsung 40x] is first accessed.
Doesn't matter if there's a disc in there - just cat
/dev/cd0a will do.  Once this is done, light resumes normal
function.

2. Various DMA problems.  CD doesn't work at all unless
accessed in PIO mode - this I gather is often the case for
CDs anyway - but the parallel port can't be used with DMA
either [system hangs if you try].  Both HDDs [fujitsu 8.4
and maxtor 2.5] and the ZIP drive seem to work in DMA mode.

The system virtually stops when data is being written to
PIO parallel port, so this is bad.

3. Crashes.  On 3 occasions the system has totally frozen
while I've not been anywhere near it, without leaving
anything in the logs.  On one of these occasions I tried
network access to see if it was X that crashed; it didn't
respond.

If no advice is forthcoming on why this might be happening
[I'm open to the possibility of hardware fault], suggestions
on how to debug a system that dies with a frequency of less
than a week, without leaving any remains, would be helpful
too.

Mark <><