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I had something similar which bugged me for months, but involved not the ide hd's, but the cdrom and cdrw on the second ide channel (hdc and hdd). I have a Pioneer cdrom drive (hdc) as master and an Aopen cdrw (hdd) as slave. Ide-scsi is used for the cdrw. Everything would work fine for some time, and then I would hear the cdrom drive being accessed for no reason, and have a whole bunch of errors very similar to what you reported. The only solution was to reboot, and then the machine would freeze at the hd detection stage and I would have a white vertical line accross the screen. I sometime had to stop and restart 30 times before the machine would restart, or leave it switched off for some time, then restart. I first suspected a motherboard problem, but the problem remained after I moved from an MSI to an Epox. I then changed my video card, to no avail. The problem only disappeared when I removed the two cd drives, and changed from master/slave to cable select on both drives. Since then, everything has been fine. I don't know if this makes any sense, I just know that my ploblem has disappeared. FX -- ______________________ Courtesy of SuSE Linux http://www.nibz.org