ATA problems

[Ivan Voras]

I tried to upgrade 5.2.1 system to 5-current, and came across a weird 
problem: one of my disks (with the root partition, ofcourse...) is being 
misdetected as being SATA150 and having a large garbage-looking number 
of TBs for size (as well as identifier consisting of < P P P...>.

The weird thing is: I isolated the problem to inclusion of WITNESS in 
the kernel. If the WITNESS is commented out of the kernel config, the 
above error occurs, if the WITNESS is present, there's no error. (I 
tried lots of other options like fiddling with INVARIANTS, but it really 
is the presence WITNESS option that causes it). My make.conf only 
contains use.perl variables.

The system works perfectly with 5.2.1-RELEASE, and WinXP (dual boot). 
Other drives in the system, as well as CD reader and CD writer drives 
are recognized ok. Motherboard is oldish VIA KT133A (VIA 82C686B UDMA 
100 controller, which is recognized correctly in every case). The error 
is "timeout READ_MUL - retrying", accompanied by a worrying sound from 
the drive, similar, bot not quite equal, to the drive spinning down...


-- 
What part of "Ph'nglui mglw'nath Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn" don't
you understand?