Re: VIA silent disk corruption - fixed for me

[Petr Vandrovec]

I wrote on 6 Feb evening CET:
> On  6 Feb 01 at 15:24, Udo A. Steinberg wrote:
> > 
> > > So for today I'm back on [UMS]DMA disabled. I'll try downgrading BIOS
> > > today, but it looks to me like that something is severely broken here.
> > 
> > Are your drives connected to the VIA or the Promise controller? Mine
> > are both connected to the PDC20265 and running in UDMA-100 mode. There
> > have been several threads on lkml about corruption on disks connected
> > to Via chipset IDE controllers, although I didn't follow them in great
> > detail. Maybe your problem is not related to the host bridge, but to
> > the IDE controller?
> 
> They are connected to Promise, I reserved VIA for CDROM drive.
> One HDD runs in UDMA5 mode, another in UDMA2. Corruption is often
> when I run md5sum in parallel on both HDDs - in that case almost
> no file generates same checksum which was generated using PIO4.
> When I run md5sum on only one HDD, there are about 4 checksum errors
> in 6GB of data. But I'm more and more inclined to throw this A7V away,
> as it is impossible to get datasheet from Promise, and for VIA host
> bridge I was just able to slow down normal system operation by factor
> of 3... but still with same corruption :-( Just if page could have
> 4092 and not 4096 bytes ;-)

After upgrading BIOS (it did not help) I decided to switch my secondary
harddisk to master. And voila - hde running UDMA5, hdg running UDMA2
(hdf/hdh does not exist), whole night stresstests, no corruption.

So at least for me it means that Promise Linux driver does not support
slave-only configuration. I did not checked whether master-slave pair
works, but master alone for sure works for me.

That is, for me problem was not in VIA bridge, but in PDC20265 driver...
                                            Best regards,
                                                Petr Vandrovec
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