corrupted swap with 2.0.18...CMD640?

Dale Scheetz (dwarf@polaris.net)
Sat, 7 Sep 1996 16:23:03 -0400 (EDT)

I have a pentium on a PCI motherboard, with dual ide controlers. The
primary controler has, of course, always worked. However, since 1.3.13 or
so there have been several kernels that didn't work at all, and most
recently have only worked with the CMD640 fixes installed. With 2.0.18
(upgrade from 2.0.15), I got the following, while burning a CD:

hdc: drive not ready for command
hdc: status error: status=0x00
ide1: reset: success
hdc: status timeout : status = 0x80 { Busy }

The image for the CD was coming from the only drive on the secondary ide
controler (ide1) and the end result was a blown CD (eight bucks). I
immediately rebooted into my last known "very stable" 2.0.11 kernel. Later
in the day (actually sometime during the night) during a long download, I
got this:

hdc: read_intr: status=0x59 { DriveReady SeekComplete DataRequest Error }
hdc: read_intr: error=0x04 Drive Status Error
ide1: reset: success

several times. It did not seem to affect the download. Not surprising
since no partitions on ide1 were being accessed. This left me with the
only effected partition being a 96 meg swap partition at the end of that
drive.
I rebuilt that swap partition and have not seen any errors yet (still
downloading) after about 5 hours.
This leads me to believe that the swap partition was corrupted by the
2.0.18 kernel.
Questions:

A. How do I tell that I do, in fact, have the CMD640 device?

2. As I have never seen these types of errors before, is it possible
that I have a dying drive or controler? (drive is brand new +- a
few weeks)

D. What, if anything can I do to contribute to fixing this?

TIA,

Dwarf

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aka Dale Scheetz Phone: 1 (904) 877-0257
Flexible Software Fax: NONE
Black Creek Critters e-mail: dwarf@polaris.net

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