Strange behaviour with gigabit ethernet

[Andrew Ingram <andrew@uk.clara.net>]

Hi List!

I recently upgraded my home network to gigabit ethernet, replacing my old 
10/100hub with a Netgear gigabit switch.

I was doing some transfer speed experiements between my Linux machine and my 
windows machine, copying things to and from a samba share and I ran into some 
problems.

Basically, copying FROM the samba share onto the windows box was like 
lightning, as expected. However, copying TO the samba share from the windows 
box was pathetic (something which took 6 minutes to transfer from the share 
was going to take 200minutes to put back!).

I looked at dmesg and noticed lots of:
eth1: -- ERROR --
        Class:  Hardware failure
         Nr:  0x26f
         Msg:  FIFO overflow error

Does anyone know what this means?

The box is a Sid box, running a Debian 2.6.12 kernel and the ethernet card is 
a (from lspci):
Ethernet controller: 3Com Corporation 3c940 10/100/1000Base-T [Marvell] 
using the sk98lin kernel module.

When the module is loaded on bootup, it ouputs:
 eth1: network connection up using port A
     speed:           1000
     autonegotiation: yes
     duplex mode:     full
     flowctrl:        symmetric
     role:            master
     irq moderation:  disabled
     scatter-gather:  enabled


I'm hoping that I just need to pass some extra parameters to the module, but 
any advice would be very welcome. I've tried googling but not found anything. 
One thing that has occurred to me just as I type this is that I am using some 
new cat 6 cable; could this error be caused by a bad cable?

Thanks,
Andrew