Hi.

I still get harddisk freezes on 2 WD1800JB drives (asus A7V8X mobo),
i.e., I have to powercycle the system to get the harddisk back working.
A cold reset is not enough.

The harddisks are connected to the primary and secondary via vt8235
controller (both disks are master).

When a harddisk 'freezes' the ide-light is continuosly on. When that
happens the machine is still ping-able but since these two disk form a
software raid0 the machine hangs on disk access.

This problem happens like once in a week....and very seldom within 3
days. 

The system is athlon xp 2.4G+ a7v8x mainboard 1.5g ddr333 memory kernel
2.4.21-pre2 (did not work with 2.4.20 that is why I went to the pre
version)

So far I have ruled out the following:
- it is not a cable problem (tested several cables)
- the memory of the machine seems to be ok (memtest ran for 2 days
without reporting an error)
- it is not a problem of the power supply (tested another powersupply)
- the harddisk are ok ( I ran the vendors check program )

Now it could be that the via vt8235 chipset has a bug, the linux ide
handling code is buggy or the firmware of the drive is not ok. 

It is probably a vt8235 problem or linux driver problem since a I know
of 8 wdc1800jb disks with that firmware version running since >1month in
a hardware raid setup without problems.

I attached the kernel config, dmesg, and hdparm -I of one of the drives.

If you have any ideas/ need further infos don't hesitate to contact me.

Thanks in advance,
Soeren.