Lockups related to (possibly IDE issues) ?

[nospam@xxxxxxxxxxxxx (Jamie)]

I'm actually not sure if this is a bug or something I've messed up. 

Things were working until I apparently had a hard drive failure, replaced
Hard drive (drive as master and CDROM as the slave, both on IDE0).

There is no sound card, there is only a 3Com PCI card plus the other components
of a bare machine. (VGA card and the motherboard IDE, there aren't any
USB ports that I can see)

The drive is a MAXTOR  200G, with the first 50G being used for the OS (primary
partition) Setup as master = LBA, slave = AUTO in BIOS. (The BIOS can't see the
full drive.)

Seemed to lock up at random times during the install process, almost always when
copying files from the distribution CD, eventually I was able to get it
installed, only to see it lock up when it probed the CDROM (by this time,
booting from hard drive)

I inserted a CD in the drive, wondering if it was choking on the no media found,
booted again, this time it loaded and I got to the login prompt. (again, booting
from hard drive)

Then it locked up just as I entered the password.

This seemed like defective hardware, so I installed slackware linux, compiled
the slackware kernel WHILE copying files to and from the CDROM, (intending to
give the IDE's a full workout) running interactive programs at the same time.
(Really gave it a tough workout)

Linux did not lock up, FWIW: I did confirm the files were in fact copied. 

I don't think there is anything physically defective with the actual machine. Linux
didn't indicate any error messages, nothing like that.

So.. this tells me it's probably hardware related but strictly in the context
of DragonflyBSD, as linux was not affected. (FWIW: I can't even ping the machine,
it's definately a hard lockup)

As pr. the guide, I did a 'vmstat -i' several times, there does NOT appear to
be an IRQ storm. Only thing that changed much was the clk interrupt. (which
I kind of expected :-) )

Basically, it's a machine I can mess with for awhile if it'll help you folks 
uncover anything. Eventually I'll need it to do real work, but for the interim,
nothing stored on it is critical.

This machine seems to have a pretty decent BIOS.

Bios settings:

Power Management: OFF 
ACPI I/O Device Node is OFF. (I've experimented with this, so far, no dif.)
PNP OS is switched ON.

Anything I should try? 

Jamie
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