Ralph, Jochen Schulz wrote:
Ralph Katz:Lenny install on newly acquired used Dell hangs and throws errors to syslog. Do I have two bad disks or a more serious hardware problem?Another option: it might be a kernel problem. I don't remember the specifics anymore, but on one of my systems I had similar errors. After replacing the disk and still getting these errors, I found hints that the kernel might be at fault. I then installed a newer kernel from backports.org and the problems went away.
What processor and chipset does your motherboard use? Do you get Does changing your IDE/ATA controllers from DMA mode to PIO mode stop the message? (I had similar problems (got similar log message) with a dual-processor AMD Athlon MP board. Apparently, the AMD chipset apparently had some bug, the Linux didn't work around that particular bug, and the kernel's IDE DMA code (or maybe filesystem code) wasn't very robust--it didn't retry an operation that failed because of a detected DMA timeout, and it didn't even detect that the operation failed and stop (panic or something) before things (disk and filesystem state) became inconsistent.) Daniel --