I've posted a couple times about this with no replies yet.... Earlier today, the entire computer came crashing to a halt... so it forced me to spend more time looking into the problem. The motherboard I have (ASUS M2N-e SLI) has 4 SATA2 ports. SATA 1, 2, 3 and 4. I also have a SATA1 RAID controller with 2 SATA ports. I have drives connected on IDE0 and IDE1 and they are working fine. Scenario 1: If I leave the RAID card out, and just connect drives to SATA 1 and SATA 2.... the computer boots fine. BIOS finds the SATA drives, and Linux is happy. Scenario 2: If I add drives to SATA 3 and 4 in Scenario 1, the BIOS sees all four drive2, but when I boot Linux, it errors out. I can boot the OS, but the error logs fill up with errors, and I have serious performance issues.. until it just dies altogether. The boot errors look like this: ----------------- <6>ata3: SATA link up 3.0 Gbps (SStatus 123 SControl 300) <4>ata3.00: qc timeout (cmd 0x27) <4>ata3.00: failed to read native max address (err_mask=0x4) <4>ata3: failed to recover some devices, retrying in 5 secs <6>ata3: SATA link up 3.0 Gbps (SStatus 123 SControl 300) <4>ata3.00: qc timeout (cmd 0x27) <4>ata3.00: failed to read native max address (err_mask=0x4) <3>ata3.00: revalidation failed (errno=-5) <4>ata3: limiting SATA link speed to 1.5 Gbps <4>ata3.00: limiting speed to UDMA7:PIO5 <4>ata3: failed to recover some devices, retrying in 5 secs ------------------ and continue on for quite some time. Scenario 3: If I add the RAID card in to Scenario 1, but do not connect any drives to the RAID, all boots and works OK. Scenario 4: If I connect 2 SATA drives to the RAID card, and have two drives from Scenario 1 also connected, all works and boots OK. Scenario 5: If I connect a SATA drive to SATA 3 or 4 in Scenario 4, I get the same results as with Scenario 2... a long list of SATA errors on the boot. Has anyone encountered this before? Could it be a hardware issue.. a failing SATA controller on the motherboard, or is it some obscure Linux thing? C. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org