Mike McCarthy wrote:

Bill Davidsen wrote:

quoted

Mike McCarthy wrote:

quoted

Bill Davidsen wrote:

quoted

Given heavy 2.6.25 use, my guess is still that the root cause of 
this is hardware, and that the change in disk code either triggers 
the hardware problem, or handles it differently. Are you by any 
chance running NCQ on your system?

No.  This system and the drives pre-date NCQ.  I think NCQ is only 
implemented in SATA and these are IDE drives.  Sometime over the 
weekend, I am going to reload SUSE 11 and try to do some more 
debugging.

BTW: It's back to 10.3 (kernel 2.6.22) running happily with a VMware 
server thrashing away at the disks.

This has recycled back to the top of my todo list, I have a server in 
mothballs with IDE drives, I'll pull it out, upgrade to FC9 current 
(non-rawhide) and see if I have any problems. It's off due to lack of 
need, not really obsolete, so it's a fair test. O'll put a dew 
hundred GB of raid-1 and beat on it.

I was going to get back to you all today and let you know what I 
found.  On Thursday, I rebuilt the system with SUSE 11 but before I 
did I went over all of the BIOS settings.  The second IDE drive was 
set to "NONE" instead of "AUTO".  Well, the installation went without 
the previous hitch of having to manually install grub on the first 
boot after the install.  It has also been running since then without 
issue.

Is it that simple?  Could that be all that was wrong?  What doesn't 
make sense is how 10.3 (kernel 2.6.22) never had an issue.  Perhaps 
without the BIOS reporting the second drive, the later kernel chose 
the wrong parameters setting it up and they didn't match what was set 
up by the BIOS for the first drive?

Oh well, I needed to upgrade that system, I'll push testing down the 
week a day or two. It could well have been that simple.

-- 
Bill Davidsen [off-list ref]
  "Woe unto the statesman who makes war without a reason that will still
  be valid when the war is over..." Otto von Bismark