Don't know if this will help or not but this problem was discussed
at some
length on various VIA HArdware sites. IIRC, it was tracked down to an
incompatibility
between the Southbridge and, of all things, the Soundblaster Live! sound
card.
Do you have such an animal in this machine? Either way, recent BIOS
updates have
come out to correct just this issue. You might want to try snagging one
from your
manufacturer. A BIOS upgrade certainly helped MY system out.
Michael Perry wrote:
>HI all-
>
>Awhile ago, I built a system which was destined to be my webserver which
>was a AMD Duron 800 with the "fabled" Kt133a Southbridge chipset. AFter
>numerous backups with amanda, I kept on getting i/o errors and strange
>dump reports using an IBM 45 gig ATA 100 drive. On the system, the
>drive was filled with dma retries and resets. I tried a whole bunch of
>stuff to solve this including stepping the system down to no-DMA but
>still had the problems. This was on a 2.4.13 kernel with the VIA ide
>driver enabled; which usually fixes this sort of thing. At the end of
>things, the drive started clanking on copying my build to a replacement
>disk drive and I realized that the drive was probably gonna fail on me
>at any moment. It also made me doubt that validity of backups since
>each one seemed to have the strange dump reports in it but they all
>completed.
>
>My main note here is to move carefully when using this particular
>chipset and controller and different IDE drives. For me, any amount of
>intensive disk io caused the system to burp out literally hundreds of
>dma reset/retry errors. Replacing the drive with a Maxtor DiamondMax
>80g drive solved the problems completely.
>
>If you see dma resets/retries when doing amanda dumps, you may want to
>doublecheck what you are using as far as dma settings on the drive.
>
>
--
------------------------------------------------------
Aaron Smith vox: 616.226.9550
Network Director fax: 616.349.9076
Nexcerpt, Inc. [EMAIL PROTECTED]
