On Tue, May 26, 2009 at 08:33:30PM -0500, Roger Heflin wrote: > Not what you are going to want to hear but badly designed hardware. > > On a machine I had with 4 disks (2 on a build-in via, 2 on other > ports--either a built-in promise, or a sil pci card), when the 2 > build-in via sata ports got used heavily at the same times as any ... > It appeared to me as designed the via chipsets (And think your > chipset is pretty close to the one I was using) did not appear to deal > with with high levels of traffic to several devices at once, and would > become unstable. > > Once I figured out the issue, I could duplicate it in under 5 minutes, > and the only working solution was to not use the via ports. > > My mb at the time was a Asus k8v se deluxe with a K8T800 chipset, and > so long as it was not heavily used it was stable, but under heavy use > it was junk. That does sound like my problem, and the hardware is similar. However, I don't think it's the VIA controller that's the problem here: I moved the two drives off the on-board VIA controller and placed them as slaves on the Promise card. I was able to install fedora, which was an improvement, but once installed, I was able to bring the system down again by forcing a check. I've got a spare Promise IDE controller, so I tried swapping it out, with no change. I suppose it's a weird hardware bug, although it still is strange that certain combinations of kernels (which makes a little sense) + distributions (which makes no sense) will work. I just went back to debian on the machine, and it works fine. I'm trying to reproduce the problem on another machine, but I'm not too hopeful. -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-raid" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
