FWIW, just like my alim5x3 based Sparcs, I have to boot with ide=nodma
on my VAIO laptop which uses PIIX chipsets, otherwise I get data
corruptions.

Ok thats I think a first ever and only report for the VAIO. Are you using
ACPI and what compiler are you using ? Do you have APIC support enabled ?
Does it occur with a vanilla Red Hat 2.4.20- kernel ?

On the VAIO it shows up as corrupted kernel builds.  The build
is successful but the images won't boot properly, rebuilding
the same kernel tree with ide=nodma results in a working image.
This shows up with both 2.4.21 and 2.4.22-current.

If you cp lots of data around then compare what is the error pattern,
thats basically essential info to debug this as is the drive data,
mode selected and so on

This suggests, at least to me, that it's something generic in
the IDE layer of 2.4.x vanilla vs. 2.6.0-test1 that's causing
the problems, rather than a chipset specific issue.

That would be unlikely since someone found the ali problem with
sparc/alpha but just never bothered to send a patch to fix it.

Alan