Thanks for the idea, but yeah - I did. I tried the obvious options of
explicitly jumpering one device master and one slave, jumpering them
both cable select, and the less obvious jumpering them 1 CS and the
other slave ( not a good idea ) Anyway, my somewhat final analysis was based on trying the drives (1 at a time) in a different system, where it was the only device on the IDE channel. Each drive did the same, and the same problem persisted. I even tried booting into Windows command line and using that version of fdisk to rezap the boot record and table. But to no avail. It remains a possibility that my AMD64 configuration ruined them, but I can't be certain. All I'm certain of is that both drives are now pooched and I am not planning on making any file systems with my nice AMD64 system. I have a workaround, so it's not serious. Just annoying. :) Bill Paul Brook wrote: Sep 1 19:32:59 localhost kernel: hdd: dma_timer_expiry: dma status == 0x41 Sep 1 19:33:09 localhost kernel: hdd: DMA timeout error Sep 1 19:33:09 localhost kernel: hdd: dma timeout error: status=0xf1 {Busy } Sep 1 19:33:09 localhost kernel: Sep 1 19:33:09 localhost kernel: hdd: DMA disabled Sep 1 19:33:09 localhost kernel: ide1: reset: master: error (0x7f?) Sep 1 19:33:09 localhost kernel: hdd: set_geometry_intr: status=0x71 {DriveReady DeviceFault SeekComplete Error } Sep 1 19:33:09 localhost kernel: hdd: set_geometry_intr: error=0x04 {DriveStatusError }Have you tried swapping drives/jumpers round so that the problematic drive is the master? Possibly also try putting it on its own channel. Misconfigured multiple-drive IDE setups will often appear to work, then give strange errors. I've seen problems when mixing master/slave drives with different capabilities, particularly when the master was a cdrom drive. AFAICT this is caused by buggy drive hardware/firmware, and the only solution is to move things about till you find a configuration that works. Paul |