Re: [BUG] ide dma_timer_expiry, then hard lockup

Google seems to show that there is no publically available 
firmware updates for Maxtor disks.

There are for some but only if you irritate the tech support people.

hours at high cpu usage.... There were maybe a a dozen DriveReady
SeekComplete Timeout errors clustered a few minutes apart.  

That suggests the drive is having problems occassionally and that the DMA
path code then blows up when they occur.

Is there a way of viewing the contents of he command queue on
the hard drive, to see if the command actually made it across?

queue ? You are overestimating IDE ;)

When the command is written you wait 400nS and then BSY is supposed to be
asserted. DRQ and other bits then handshake the data at the software
level with IORDY doing it at the hardware level for PIO (except in early
drives/low speeds where its done by the prayer and timing tolerance
approach)

Its unlikely the command got lost. The IRQ could have done but the error
path tries to spot that case by reading the status register - which
hangs. So in theory it could be a lost IRQ and if the reset works we'll
find that out.

Alan