FIXED!!!

[Andrew Hall]

Okay, to everyone who has been having grief with 7880 / 7895 chipsets and linux 2.1.105/2.0.34 with the persistent 

scsi bus timeout...
trying harder...
reset bus...
scsi bus timeout... etc,

thanks to a suggestion from a guy who helped me with what I thought was a totally unrelated problem, I think I now know what is causing it. There is a setting in the bios on the new ATX motherboards to do with power management. I'm still not sure what it does, but here is this guy's suggestion and believe it or not it worked and I had no more problems with any of my devices:

Hi Andrew,

I had a similar problem with a Tyan Tiger motherboard, same kernel (RH51 
distribution) and an 82558.(Intel eepro100b NIC)

Now, I'm assuming that your motherboard may be an ATX conforming to the 
PC98 standards.  If so, then there are two BIOS settings that may solve 
your problem.  The first is in power management and is called "ACPI Aware 
OS", it should be set to "No".  The second is in chipset setup and is 
called "ACPI Control Register", it should be set to "Disabled" (I believe 
it's enabled by default).

I don't know a whole lot about PC98 and ACPI, I just know that none of my 
PCI cards would work until I disabled the ACPI control register.

Hope this helps,
Mark

It did.. it helped me no end... So thanks mark, and I hope it helps others who are having the same problems..

regards,
Andrew.
ps. Thanks Troy and others for your help too.. 
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