Hi there folks,

I have 2 promise controllers running on one system, the machine has a total of 12 Harddrives in it. Problems occur when I transfer data from 1 of the harddrives attached to one of the controllers and move it to a drive attached to the other controller.
so basically also when making a raid device, like a stripe / mirror or whatever. As soon as you do an mkfs /dev/mdx the machine hangs after 400/500 blocks.
So I thought maybe one of the drives was faulty, so I took out drive after drive, but even with 1 drive on both controllers the machine still hangs when moving stuff around, so next guess was the controllers, replaced both the controllers with Promise Ultra 100 controllers instead of them 133 Controllers, guess what ? same problem occurs.
Well after having a very close look at dmesg I noticed the machine bitching about 'Spurious IRQ 7 on V59xxxA chipset,
After checking that I noticed nothing is attached on IRQ 7 (cat /proc/interrupts and after checking the bios).
Well as a last resort I just migrated the box to a 2.5.69(debian) kernel, which solves the spurious IRQ 'message' but still hangs the system when using both IDE controllers at once.

most of you might think that this might be an IRQ problem, as it is some dodgy VIA chipset, but I even tried another motherboard (P4) instead of AMD so that can't have anything to do with it either.

to be honest, I'm lost... if anyone has some bright ideas PLEASE let me know as this machine is a production server and should be up an running within this week

Thanks very much in advance for your time!

Kind regards,

Nils.