I've got a hard lockup in the ide subsystem, probably
due to some irq spew or something like that.
I've just bought a brand new Maxtor 320GB disk driver for the insane price of $70 US to replace another failing drive. It works well under light load;
I was able to copy about 60GB to it. However, under heavy load, such as reconstruction of an MD RAID-1 array, it'll lock up the kernel. Which means
that my system won't boot :-(
I'm running 2.6.21.1, although the problem seems to occur in 2.6.19 and 2.6.18 too; its been there a while; I vageuly
remember similar problems in 2.6.5 or 2.6.10.
Ah... so you're saying that the old disk works OK, yet you've already observed alike behavior on other disks... That speaks against blacklisting the drive.
I can get the system to boot by sneaking in an "hdparm -d0 /dev/hdc" early in the boot process, to turn off
Could probably do the same trick and specify the lower DMA speed by using -X n option (where n ranges from 64 to 70 for UltraDMA modes 0 to 6) and see if it changes anything...