Hi, 

there were some messages here, that reported problems with 
harddrives. Some mentioned specifically VIA chipsets and ATA 100 
drives. According to reports from german websites there is a 
problem with the VIA 686B-southbridge. The existance of this 
problem has been confirmed by VIA (according to techchannel.de), 
BIOS updates that eliminate (or work around) this bug should be 
available shortly.

It looks like the problem can be reproduced by attaching two ATA 
100 disk (in DMA mode (?)) to the first and second ATA 100 
channels and copying data from one drive to the other. That should 
lead to data loss or corruption or even to system crashes (windows 
oriented sites). It seems like additional DMA traffic can enhance the 
problem, soundblaster cards are known to very problematic.

It looks like deactivating "PCI Delay Transaction" and "PCI Master 
Read Caching" and setting "PCI Latency" to a value of 0 to 32 will 
eliminate the problem also, at the cost of some performance.

HTH

mike