First, please consider that I am a newbie and that English is not my mother tongue.

Recently, I installed Debian Squeeze (4.3.5-4, kernel 2.6.32-5-686) on my old beaten-up hobo Pentium II laptop, with a 6GB IDE hard drive.

Every 5 minutes or so (more often when I write data to the hard drive), the computer freezes for a little while, and afterwards I get always the same kernel error (I typed it here, being unable to copy it right now) :

ata1: lost interrupt (Status 0x58)
ata1.00: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x0 action 0x6 frozen
ata1.00: BMDMA stat 0x4
ata1.00: failed command: WRITE DMA
ata1.00: cmd ca/00:10:af:15:54/00:00:00:00:00/e0 tag 0 dma 8192 out
res 58/00:10:af:15:54/00:00:00:00:00/e0 Emask 0x2 (HSM violation)
ata1.00: status: { DRDY DRQ }

I saw posts reporting similar errors but I was unable to find a solution to this specific problem.

I really don't know what to do... Thanks in advance for your help, and do not hesitate to ask further logs or hardware specs.

Eugene

You should use smartctl tool to test your hard disk at first. It look like your hard disk is little old, IDE.

1 members found this post helpful.

Thanks for the advice, I didn't know smartctl. I'll do that and keep you in touch.