On Fri, 2006-02-17 at 11:03 -0800, Benjamin Smith wrote: > On Thursday 16 February 2006 18:36, Paul wrote: > > > > > Currently, it's got an ASRock "M810LMR" motherboard in it. > > > http://www.ciao.co.uk/ASRock_M810LMR__5410842 > > > > Looks like this board is based on a early socket A VIA chipset ... > > generally I would avoid these. My past experience with older VIA > > chipsets has been less than good ... I've had issues with buggy IDE > > implementations in KT266 & KT133A and having to run them in PIO mode > > rather than DMA mode (SLOW). > > My conclusion, as well. (and yes, it runs in PIO mode, and it's slow, and I > don't care since this system isn't a high-load system) > > > I would use a cheap PCI IDE card and see what happens. > > It's a 1U system. PCI cards are pretty much out of the question. Hmmm have you tried switching off dma in grub (IIRC adding ide0=nodma ide1=nodma to the kernel line should do that)? It sounds like you may have tried that. I would also run the drives on separate IDE cables, looks like you tried that, but maybe not in conjunction with nodma Regards, Paul Berger