Greetings!
I've recently had the same problem with two different systems while
trying to upgrade the RAID drives. Both systems are dual processor
Pentium machines (one a Dual Xeon, one a dual PIII), and both have new
Promise TX4 cards to support new SATA drives. I'm using the 2.6.10
kernel software RAID-5.
I can create the array, but when I try to put a filesystem on it using
'mkfs.ext3', the system inevitably hangs and 'ataXX: command timeout'
appears on the console before it's completely locked up (no
Ctrl-Alt-SysReq, no caps lock, etc.). The timeouts do not happen on the
same ata interface each time, so I don't think it's the controllers or
the drives.
On one system I finally just replaced the motherboard with a single
processor K7 board and the whole thing has been running well for about a
week now. On the other system (the Xeon box), 'noapic' passed to the
kernel has allowed me to actually put a filesystem on the newly created
RAID. I can't remember if I tried 'noapic' on the first system because
I was trying so many different things.
Now I'm a bit nervous about both systems and I'm wondering what the
appropriate solution is (just use 'noapic', get newer motherboards,
don't use SMP, etc.)? Is there a patch that's reported to fix this, or
are these problems due to insufficient support for SATA controllers on
the older motherboards I've tried?
I'm happy to provide any details, if it might help.
Thanks,
Chris
--
Christopher S. Swingley email: [email protected] (work)
Intl. Arctic Research Center [email protected] (personal)
University of Alaska Fairbanks http://www.frontier.iarc.uaf.edu/~cswingle/