For further info on this issue see this posting first:

http://www.computing.net/linux/wwwb...

Here's what I have done since then. I have recompiled the kernel as I found out that trying to use the slaved cf card would crash the system even though lilo was passing ide=nodma to the kernel. Since compiling and installing the new kernel that has pci-auto for ide left out, that issue is now gone. The only issue still remaining is during shutdown. For some reason I get a dma timeout when the swap partition is being turned off. I can't imagine how this can be the case with dma support left out of the kernel unless there's a dma that's getting by somewhere else. This is not a major problem but I'd like to get it fixed if possible. Sometime in the futue I'm going to install the 2.6.18 kernel source see about using that.

Have you checked whether USE_DMA is set in "/etc/sysconfig/harddisks" ?

No, I haven't done that. I'll look into it.