I've been having some issues with one particular PC. At first, I blamed the distro. Having tried several I eventually got some useful information that indicated it wasn't the distro but a problem with DMA. So I blamed the drive. Finally having the time to sort it out, I replaced the drive with a spare, changed the IDE cable (just in case) and rebuilt the OS. Sure enough, I still get the same errors.

My next step is to place fault on the Motherboard. :-/

In the process, I've had 2 Western Digital hard drives go bad on me and potentially a third. For a home user, this is looking to be quite a costly problem...

Before I end up replacing my whole system from the ground up, are there any other components I should check that could affect the system?

The symptoms of the problem in Debian are:
. I use hdparm to set my parameters; any parameters with DMA cause the issue. For example hdparm -d1 -X34 -c1 -m2 /dev/hda ; Initially this will yield a hdparm -t /dev/hda read time to be maybe 30-40MB/s (slow, but in the right range)
. As soon as there is any heavy I/O, like copying a 600MB file or performing a series of file copies, the computer begins to "freeze". Response time slows, and slows and slows until it's completely unresponsive. A system beep can take 30 seconds or more!
. dmesg shoes dma_intr errors such as
hda: dma_intr: status=0x51 { DriveReadySeakComplete Error }
hda: dma_intr: error=0x84 { DriveStatusError BadCRC }
ide0: reset: success

Is this really the motherboard or will I be placing fault on the wrong component again? All drives I have used have been Western Digital Caviar's (160GB, 120GB 200GB).

Yes, this is probably the motherboard. What kind of chipset is it using?

I know this thread is getting old but I've been getting this error myself with an ASUS A7M266-D motherboard and a WD Caviar 160G HD. I also blamed the motherboard, because I got it used for free and had to replace a few leaky capacitors. It surprised me that when I googled this problem, the first results I saw were from people using the WD Caviar HDs. I could boot from a super grub disk cdrom and load the grub configfile on the hard drive only by disabling DMA to these drives in the BIOS. I've never been able to get past that. It stops at Waiting for root file system... and then goes into BusyBox. At this point, /dev/hdb exists but the partition is not listed. This never caused a problem for me in any of the other three computers I used it in. Is there a way to work around this or do I need to replace the motherboard?