I'm having a problem reading data off a specific hard drive. At first I thought it was a problem with the drive but the problem also occurs with a new 200 gig wd drive - so I'm looking for some help.

The problem occured originally with a seagate 6 gig (model not currently available - but I Can get it later if needed) drive. The system recognizes it and I was able to partition and format the drive with no problems. I can also write data to the drive with no problem. But trying to read from the drive causes the system to hardlock almost as soon as the read starts - fast enough that nothing is ever sent to the system logs. I was very sure this was a bad drive until I replaced it with a new 200 gig WD drive which has the exact same issue.

Basic system info:

- Via Apollo chipset MB (some generic thing - no name on it - I inheretied it second hand)
- AMD K6/2 300 MHZ
- 64 Meg ram - 2 identicle 32 meg simms, tests good
- 3 ide hard disks
- 1 ide cdrom
- 2 external scsi hard disks on an tekram DC395 controller
- 2 nics (Linksys LNE100 TX version 2 and a longshine unknown model Realtek 8029 chip pci-ne2k compatible)
- Mandrake 9.1 - kernel is 2.4.21-0.13mdk
- Same problem on Mandrake 10 - kernel is 2.6.3-7mdk

The system config is fairly complicated - if you need more detail on something than I've included please ask.

IDE drive config is as follows:
hda: WDC AC28400R, ATA DISK drive
hdb: Cyberdrive 120D, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM drive
hdc: WDC WD2000JB-00GVA0, ATA DISK drive
hdd: WDC AC36400L, ATA DISK drive

hdc is the one giving me problems.

The kernel is automatically disableing DMA for all IDE drives.

All partitions have ext3 filesystems.

I have previously had a twin WDC AC36400L in place of hdc that worked fine. At the same time I've had a seagate 8 gig drive in place of hdc that has the same problem.

hda, hdd, sda, and sdb are all involved in raid arrays (/home is on a raid5, /var and a data partition are on raid0) making it rather difficult to remove any of those drives from the system.

Things I have already tried:

- Googling the net for similar issues
- new ide cable
- switching hdc and hdd - problem follows the physical drive
- booting with ide=nodma option (anyone know if mandrake has the ide driver built in or if its a module? no matter what I issue to lilo DMA is still enabled for both ide0 and ide1 and the kernel later disables dma for all 4 ide drives)
- removing hdb and moving hdd to hdb (to get hdc on its own chain)
- kernel versions 2.4.21-0.13mdk and 2.6.3-7mdk

output of lspci:

via-agp : VIA Technologies|VT82C598 [Apollo MVP3] [BRIDGE_HOST]
unknown : VIA Technologies|VT82C598 [Apollo MVP3 AGP] [BRIDGE_PCI]
unknown : VIA Technologies|VT82C586/A/B PCI-to-ISA [Apollo VP] [BRIDGE_ISA]
unknown : VIA Technologies|VT82C586 IDE [Apollo] [STORAGE_IDE]
unknown : VIA Technologies|VT82C586B ACPI [BRIDGE_OTHER]
ne2k-pci : Realtek|RTL-8029(AS) [NETWORK_ETHERNET]
dc395x_trm : Tekram|TRM-S1040 [STORAGE_SCSI]
tulip : Lite-On|LC82C115 PNIC-II [NETWORK_ETHERNET]
Card:Voodoo Banshee (generic): 3Dfx Interactive, Inc.|Voodoo Banshee [DISPLAY_VGA]




Any suggestions or insight is very welcome.