civileme,
Thank you for your help.
Trying with the noautotune option made the 2.4-kernel successfully
boot without errors and hdparm -t /dev/hda gave 12.50 MB/sec. After
that timing of hdb resulted in the 'hdb: dma_intr: ...' errors and
gave 4.3 MB/sec. The log file showed:
...
hdb: dma_intr:
I have concluded several rounds of stress testing on 2.4.0 with Maxtor and
IBM drives, fast with optimisation set to the highest, up to 30 routines
writing to disk running in parallel.
I am unable to reproduce the error you reported. Perhaps some additional
information on your hardware is
