Stanislav Brabec wrote:

Looking at the syslog in Novell bug 232086 in detail, following line may
indicate hardware failure:
usb 5-1: string descriptor 0 read error: -22

I don't think usb 5-1 is related to ide-floppy problem.

My drive is a slave on bus, where master is a modern Seagate ST3160812A.

On my system I see two regressions:
- One between year 2002 kernels and SuSE Linux 10.0:
  Delay with "packet command initiated yet DRQ isn't asserted" before
  first read access, then the read will succeed.
  I did not yet reproduce this regression just now on my hardware.
- Second between SuSE 10.1 and 10.2:
  Delay with "packet command initiated yet DRQ isn't asserted" before
  any attempt to access, then it will fail.
  This regression is reproducible just now on my hardware, but still may
  be caused by hardware problems raised by a slightly different
  initialization order.

I see.

Tejun Heo wrote:

quoted

[libata]
And, as the device requires custom high level driver, libata fails
miserably.  Would it be worth to try support these devices?  Or are
they just too outdated to put the effort in?

As far as I remember, it was working without any special driver with
ide-scsi.

If that's the case, libata should work too as long as the HSM problem is
fixed.

-- 
tejun