I am running Fedora Core 3 on a Dell PowerEdge 6000 Server. It has 3 IDE controllers built into it.

I have two IDE controllers, the one embedded with the server (with three channels) and a PCI Ultra 100 TX2 that was bundled with a Western Digital 160GB drive.

My embedded IDE has connected to the primary channel my system drive (Samsung). The ternary channel is meant only to be used with CDs and DVD drives - so I have my CD ROM attached to it. For performance purposes, I installed the Ultra 100 TX2 card, and connected the Western Digital to that IDE controller - I run Oracle and I like to keep my /home partition under a different physical drive.

I've had the server for quite a while (Since RH 7.0), and since the early stages I've had the following issue, however, it has been a lot more frequent lately and I have no idea why.

The issue is that the PCI Ultra 100 TX2 BIOS recognizes the WD drive, Fedora hass no problem (sees it as hde). After the server has been up for a while, I get an I/O error message and I have to bring the server down. When I bring it down, if I reboot, the PCI Ultra 100 TX2 card no longer recognizes the WD drive unless I physycally turn the server off (no power). After I power up, everything goes back to normal.

I have no clue if this is the Drive, the IDE cable, the card, the PCI slot, or the OS. It doesn't seem like an OS or PCI issue because by powering off powering on the server, everything works, but you never know....

I would really appreciate if someone can point me in the right direction.

Interesting.... If my Oracleand httpd processes are not running, it doesn't happen as often. I'm leaning to think it is the hard drive.

Any thoughts?

Well, the IDE cable would be an easy one to narrow down; just swap it with another IDE cable and see if the problem follows the cable or the drive. But it doesn't really sound like a cable problem.

If you really wanted to narrow down the cause of your problem between the HD and the card, it would be a bit of a pain... but you could swap the two drives. AFAIK, you would have to change (a) the bios to boot from hde, (b) maybe your bootloader, to boot from hde instead of hdc or whatnot, and (c) the entries in your /etc/fstab file. I don't know, this might not be possible if your bios won't let you boot from a drive on the IDE card. It would isolate the problem, though.

Personally, I suspect the HD too, but that's just blind intuition talking.