On Tue, May 26, 2009 at 08:33:30PM -0500, Roger Heflin wrote:

Not what you are going to want to hear but badly designed hardware.

On a machine I had with 4 disks (2 on a build-in via, 2 on other 
ports--either a built-in promise, or a sil pci card), when the 2 
build-in via sata ports got used heavily at the same times as any 

...

   It appeared to me as designed the via chipsets (And think your 
chipset is pretty close to the one I was using) did not appear to deal 
with with high levels of traffic to several devices at once, and would 
become unstable.

Once I figured out the issue, I could duplicate it in under 5 minutes, 
and the only working solution was to not use the via ports.

My mb at the time was a Asus k8v se deluxe with a K8T800 chipset, and 
so long as it was not heavily used it was stable, but under heavy use 
it was junk.

That does sound like my problem, and the hardware is similar.  However, I don't think it's the VIA controller that's the problem here:  I moved the two drives off the on-board VIA controller and placed them as slaves on the Promise card.  I was able to install fedora, which was an improvement, but once installed, I was able to bring the system down again by forcing a check.  I've got a spare Promise IDE controller, so I tried swapping it out, with no change.

I suppose it's a weird hardware bug, although it still is strange that certain combinations of kernels (which makes a little sense) + distributions (which makes no sense) will work.  I just went back to debian on the machine, and it works fine.  

I'm trying to reproduce the problem on another machine, but I'm not too hopeful.