Andy R writes:
> --- Manuel Bouyer <bouyer@antioche.eu.org> wrote:
> > This is a VIA chipset, rigth ?

Yep; it's a KR7A-RAID; pretty much everything on the board is VIA,
apart from the RAID controller itself.

> > >  pciide:0:1:0: not ready, st=0xd0, err=0x00 pciide0 channel 1:
> > >  reset failed for drive 0
> > 
> > Not good at all, it means the drive doesn't respond at all any
> > more.  I've seen this on one of my disks, it would come back up
> > after a reboot, but a few day later it was definitively dead.

Hmm.  It required power down to start working again after failure -
rebooting didn't seem to help.  Curiously, it worked absolutely fine
for read; so I could mount all the partitions RO and salvage all the
data.

> > But I would eventually try another controller first.  VIA are
> > known to have some problems ...

I'll do so; at least the disk may be useful elsewhere.  Maybe I can
even make it play nicely with the RAID controller.

> Yes, I had a similar problem with my VIA equipped motherboard (and I
> don't think I'll buy a VIA again at this point, I lost gigs of
> data).

Oh dear: wish I'd asked around first!  It seems to be behaving with
the other disk (a somewhat newer 30G Quantum Fireball), anyway, so the
machine is doing the job OK.

> Be sure that you get the latest bios update for your motherboard,
> this may fix it.

Good point - I'll try that.

Thanks
Mark <><