ATA is not crap. Propably.

["Martin Eriksson" <nitrax@giron.wox.org>]

Sorry everyone I've upset.

The problem *seems* to be with my hard disks. Apparently both advertises
udma2 capability but neither is capable?? When I run the disks on my
"on-board" controller, I get a DMA timeout and the system comes to a halt
(well only the HD activity, but you can't do much without access to the
root/usr partition). When running on my HPT366 controller, I don't get the
timeouts, but I do get the "slow responding system" at about the same time
at which I get the timeouts on the PIIX4 controller. Problem comes when
having copied about 11% of a 500'000'000 byte file from /dev/hdc7 to
/dev/hda6...

The hard disks in question are models
hda: ST36451A
hdc: Maxtor 91152D8

The reason why I moved to the HPT366 controller in the first place, was
because the onboard controller / BIOS? messed up the C/H/S values on one of
the hard disks. Cannot be 100% sure though as this was a while ago (two
years?).

_____________________________________________________
|  Martin Eriksson <nitrax@giron.wox.org>
|  MSc CSE student, department of Computing Science
|  Umeå University, Sweden