Michal 'hramrach' Suchanek wrote:

Hello

I got a mainboard with a Via SATA controller, a Maxtor UATA 133 drive,
and an Asus SATA dongle (probably a Marvell chip).

When I was installing Linux the SATA controller got detected as IDE and
basically worked. I would see occasional messages about DMA timeout
while running from the install cd but the installation finished without
errors.

After building a 2.6.7 kernel I would get pretty much the same result.
I get a few messages about DMA timeout at startup and then it runs. But
I found it would eventually lock up with the hdd led shining steadily.

Could you try it with a 2.6.5 kernel please? There were some changes made between 2.6.5 and 2.6.7 
that may well cause issues with HD's attached to dongles. There have been patches created for this 
by they have not yet made the mainstream kernel.

I'd be interested to see how that pans out.

Regards,
Brad