It's sometimes the combination that matters most.  You cannot really 
make that determination yet.

	Jeff


-

Whatever.
(Though I must confess, that in spite of my Master degree in Electrical 
Engineering and extensive HW experience, I can not for the life of me 
understand how you can find it more likely to be cables (that work fine 
with other controllers), disks (that also work fine with other 
controllers) or the power-supply (that also works fine with exactly the 
same things connected to it) rather than the motherboard's 
SATA-controller (that is the item that actually is reported to fail in 
the first place). - Sure, I'm well aware that sometimes the combination 
of HW matters, but to my experience we're normally not talking about 
"dumb" stuff like cables and PSU if that is the issue.)

Anyway, I have just changed to the other (identical) motherboard, and 
things are running just fine at the moment...
I'll let you know if they start acting up (as they did before). If not I 
guess the fault was with the motherboard and not the driver - Guess 
we'll know pretty soon...

Thanks for all your effort, gents, let's hope it all works now!

BR
Jon Ivar

-

Hello,

I get a similar, if not identical, problem with an ASUS A8N SLI nforce4 based 
motherboard. The PC (with a seagate SATA-2 120 GB HDD) ran fine for two 
years , last Christmas windows xp (I didn't change either hardware or 
drivers) started crashing and the filesystem got corrupted beyond repair 
within 8 hours after every installation. The system log contained entries 
about bad sectors and, based on the seagate diagnosis tool, I returned the 
system to the supplier. According to the retail shop, neither the disk nor 
the system had any problems, so I was coerced to pay for a replacement disk. 
The replacement HDD (seagate again, 120 GB) ran fine until a month ago (this 
time the system is connected to a UPS), when the same problem occurred! I 
moved the disk to a linux system with the promise tx2plus controller (the one 
I'm typing this from), found bad sectors, formatted it and everything works 
fine for at least 6 hours of continuous disk writes and reads in this system. 
If I return the disk to the nforce4 system, it becomes corrupted within some 
hours of disk access, no matter whether linux or windows is installed, 
regardless of NCQ settings, drivers and cables.

The symptoms are the same in both cases: the system crashes, then runs for 
some hours, then the controller stops completely responding (ata1: exception 
Emask 0x10 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x1810000 action 0x2 frozen is the first error 
message), the disk access LED blinks continuously, linux 2.6.18 (opensuse 
10.2) throws lots of error messages similar to the ones you mention above, 
linux says that the device is dead and the system becomes unusable (no disk 
access). After a reboot, the filesystem is fine for some time, afterwards 
similar error messages appear, seek errors appear and the filesystem becomes 
completely destroyed. The positive part of this ordeal is that the linux SATA 
error handling works fine and linux recovered the first time, without access 
to the drive of course, while windows crashed badly and I...
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