DMA errors on hard drive, but why?

[James Green <jg@jmkg.clara.co.uk>]

Hi all,

I've got two Maxtor IDE hard drives. They have been working fine, but since I 
moved them into drive caddies I've been getting the following messages in 
dmesg output for the second drive:

cyberstorm:~# dmesg | grep hdb
    ide0: BM-DMA at 0xdc00-0xdc07, BIOS settings: hda:DMA, hdb:DMA
hdb: MAXTOR 6L080J4, ATA DISK drive
hdb: 156355584 sectors (80054 MB) w/1819KiB Cache, CHS=9732/255/63
 hdb: hdb1 hdb2 hdb3 hdb4 < hdb5 >
hdb: dma_intr: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
hdb: dma_intr: error=0x84 { DriveStatusError BadCRC }
hdb: dma_intr: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
hdb: dma_intr: error=0x84 { DriveStatusError BadCRC }
[ loops ]

At this end of this loop DMA for both drives is deactivated. I can reactivate 
it, but as soon as hdb gets some heavy activity the same errors occur.

So I'm wondering what could be the cause. I've tried two different caddies 
(both chassis and holder) so it doesn't look like a connection problem unless 
they both suffer, the drives were both fine outside of the caddies, and I've 
double checked the IDE cable is firmed in both connectors.

What should I do to diagnose this fault? Many thanks.

James Green


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