I'm trying to find the cause of some kernel lockups which occur when
accessing the disks.
I had a similar problem once. Although a big dd would also trigger it.
I had 3 disk drives and a CDROM in the machine. It basically came down to the fact that certain pairs of drives just didn't like being on the same cable. No idea why. Perhaps it was a motherboard issue. I kept trying drive permutations until I found a stable one. No problems after that.
Cheers, Carl.
