Hi,

I have what seems to be a poorly designed board (based on the number
of problems that a Google search turns up). However, since I guess
there are still people that have it and I have some capability to do
some debugging I thought I should try to fix it rather than throwing
it out.

It is possible that my problem is caused by a bad cable, bad memory,
or a bad drive, but I suspect the board is just temperamental
(specifically, the way interrupts are handled). The drive had a lot
of bad sectors a while ago but writing over them seemed to have
fixed it. The drive was working without errors with another board
for a while now.

I've tried booting with and without the "noapic" command line option
and with the old ide driver and the pata_via driver. Each
configuration seems to have its own problems. Certain configurations
generated errors like "IRQ nobody cared" and "spurious interrupt".
The noapic and ide driver combination results in the following error:

[  366.463909] spurious 8259A interrupt: IRQ7.
[ 5432.078546] hda: task_no_data_intr: status=0x30 { DeviceFault SeekComplete }
[ 5432.078555] hda: possibly failed opcode: 0xb0
[ 5462.224012] hda: lost interrupt

The "noapic" and pata_via is what I'm running now. It works for a
while and then I get an error like the following:

ata4.00: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x0 action 0x0
ata4.00: BMDMA stat 0x65
ata4.00: failed command: READ DMA
ata4.00: cmd c8/00:18:4f:27:1b/00:00:00:00:00/e0 tag 0 dma 12288 in
         res 51/10:18:4f:27:1b/00:00:00:00:00/a0 Emask 0x81 (invalid argument)
ata4.00: status: { DRDY ERR }
ata4.00: error: { IDNF }
ata4.00: configured for UDMA/100
ata4.01: configured for UDMA/100
sd 3:0:0:0: [sda] Result: hostbyte=0x00 driverbyte=0x08
sd 3:0:0:0: [sda] Sense Key : 0xb [current] [descriptor]
Descriptor sense data with sense descriptors (in hex):
        72 0b 14 00 00 00 00 0c 00 0a 80 00 00 00 00 00 
        00 1b 27 4f 
sd 3:0:0:0: [sda] ASC=0x14 ASCQ=0x0
sd 3:0:0:0: [sda] CDB: cdb[0]=0x28: 28 00 00 1b 27 4f 00 00 18 00
end_request: I/O error, dev sda, sector 1779535
ata4: EH complete

I'm attaching the kernel log for the pata_via and ide setups and the
output from lspci.

Best regards,

  Neil