Re: IDE drives and Intel P200 Pro

Larry M. Augustin (lma@varesearch.com)
Fri, 10 Jan 1997 10:40:37 -0800

I don't know what motherboard is in the Dell system, but Intel did
have a batch of VS440FX motherboards with bad National I/O controller
chips. Those boards were identified with Intel's lot number
AA660849-410. We caught these during testing before shipping to
customers. The NS chip controls floppy, serial, parallel, mouse, and
keyboard I/O. Failures may show up as keyboard errors, failed serial
ports, etc. Dell does use some Intel manufactured boards. Perhaps
"Intel P6NATOMA" is Dell's designation for the VS440FX, or the bad I/O
controller chips made it onto other boards.

Larry

>Date: Fri, 10 Jan 1997 06:37:30 -0600 (CST)
>From: "Thomas M. Browder" <browder@eglin.af.mil>
>Sender: owner-linux-kernel@vger.rutgers.edu
>Precedence: bulk
>
>I have been getting strange and erratic effects with
>my company's new Dell Dimension XPS Pro200n. I
>suspect the I/O is unreliable somehow. Dell has
>swapped out the motherboard and the drive once. They
>are sending me another drive, but I still think the
>problem may be in the model of motherboard:
>
> Intel P6NATOMA
>
>The drive with real problems is:
>
> IBM: DAQA-33240 E182115V; 3.2GB
>
>I am currently running Linux 2.0.25.
>I have problems with floppy disks and tar products
>not being able to be shared with my home machine
>running same version of Linux, tar, and mtools.
>
>At one time Dell was announcing a free upgrade to
>a Tritom motherboard for this system. That sounded
>strange to me and implied a problem with board design.
>No one at Dell will admit to a problem.
>
>I get randowm program problems which certainly may be
>I/O--two different hard drives (same hard drive works
>great in my home machine with Triton motherboard).
>
>Any help or ideas would be greatly appreciated.