[plug] something fishy about this hard drive

[Dennis Plester]

I kinda had something similar with Red Hat 6.1 and a Seagate 13GB UDMA 66 on
an Abit BH6 (only supports UDMA 33, not 66) board. It would run OK, but if
you went to one of the virtual consoles, and logged on, you would get a
semi-continuous "continuous status timout on xxx" type message. The drive
still worked, and if you got some disk commands in between the messages, and
in X there were no visible problems with messages or performance, but the
disk light would flicker with each message occurrence.

As this was my first ever Linux experience, I nearly ran back to Windows,
never to return to Linux again, but I turned a blind eye to it and kept
going.

I swapped across to Mandrake, and have not seen the problem since. My
Windows partition has nearly healed over from not being used. ;-)

Dennis.

	-----Original Message-----
	From:	Leon Brooks [SMTP:leon at brooks.smileys.net]
	Sent:	Thursday, 26 October 2000 21:56
	To:	Perth Linux Users Group
	Subject:	[plug] something fishy about this hard drive

	To save anyone else on this list from wasting hours: if you want to
install
	Linux on a Western Digital Caviar drive (in this case a 45GB),
disable UDMA in
	the *BIOS* else it (on Azza mainboards at least) misconfigures the
drive and
	renders it useless under Linux (gives continuous status timout
(0xd0) - Busy
	messages instead of results).

	-- 
	Traverse: To ski across a slope at an angle; one of two quick and
	          simple methods of reducing speed.
	Tree:     The other method. -- from "The Skier's Dictionary"