I have a promise ultra66 card and two maxtor 40gb udma/66 drives. dmesg snippet: PDC20262: IDE controller on PCI bus 00 dev 88 PDC20262: not 100% native mode: will probe irqs later PDC20262: (U)DMA Burst Bit ENABLED Primary PCI Mode Secondary PCI Mode. ide2: BM-DMA at 0x6400-0x6407, BIOS settings: hde:DMA, hdf:DMA ide3: BM-DMA at 0x6408-0x640f, BIOS settings: hdg:DMA, hdh:pio hda: WDC AC32100H, ATA DISK drive hde: Maxtor 94098U8, ATA DISK drive hdg: Maxtor 94098U8, ATA DISK drive ide0 at 0x1f0-0x1f7,0x3f6 on irq 14 ide2 at 0x6000-0x6007,0x6102 on irq 11 ide3 at 0x6200-0x6207,0x6302 on irq 11 hda: Disabling (U)DMA for WDC AC32100H hda: DMA disabled hda: WDC AC32100H, 2014MB w/128kB Cache, CHS=1023/64/63 hde: Maxtor 94098U8, 39082MB w/2048kB Cache, CHS=79406/16/63, UDMA(66) hdg: Maxtor 94098U8, 39082MB w/2048kB Cache, CHS=79406/16/63, UDMA(66) Floppy drive(s): fd0 is 1.44M FDC 0 is a post-1991 82077 md driver 0.36.6 MAX_MD_DEV=4, MAX_REAL=8 raid0 personality registered raid1 personality registered I have patched my kernel with the ide patch. RAID support and both the raid1 and raid0 personalities are compiled right into the kernel. I'm using the raidtools that came with slackware 7. my /etc/raid.conf looks like: chrome:~# cat /etc/raid.conf # Sample raid-1 configuration raiddev /dev/md0 raid-level 1 nr-raid-disks 2 nr-spare-disks 0 device /dev/hde1 raid-disk 0 device /dev/hdg1 raid-disk 1 Ok, here's the problem. I can mkraid just fine, takes a while on my 40gb drives, but works. I: mdadd /dev/md0 /dev/hde1 /dev/hdg1 mdrun -p1 /dev/md0 mount /dev/md0 /mnt/md0 All is well. I write files. I: umount /mnt/md0 mdstop /dev/md0 shutdown -r now All is fine. after booting: mdadd /dev/md0 /dev/hde1 /dev/hdg1 mdrun -p1 /dev/md0 mount /dev/md0 /mnt/md0 Files are right where i left them. Here comes the problem. umount /dev/md0 mdstop /dev/md0 <here /proc/mdstat shows md0 as inactive totally, no drives.> I: mdadd /dev/md0 /dev/hde1 /dev/hdg1 mdrun -p1 /dev/md0 All is fine (or so it seems). I: mount /dev/md0 /mnt/md0 and it locks up. mount and kflushd both start sucking up a lot of cpu and totally ignore kill -9 signals. I have to reboot to make them stop. This makes my raid unrecoverable (these are preliminary tests before actually putting my data on here), and right before it reboots, it gives me zillions of messages like: VFS: grow_buffers: size = 16384 VFS: grow_buffers: size = 16384 VFS: grow_buffers: size = 16384 VFS: grow_buffers: size = 16384 on the console and in the klogd file (prepended by '<4>'). every so often in the klogd log it also outputs 384 which shows up like this in syslog: Jul 24 14:16:19 chrome init: Switching to runlevel: 6 Jul 24 14:16:19 chrome kernel: 384 Jul 24 14:16:25 chrome last message repeated 27 times Jul 24 14:16:25 chrome exiting on signal 15 Jul 24 14:17:14 chrome syslogd 1.3-3: restart. ckraid takes 2+ hours on my two 40gb drives, even if they do operate at full udma/66, not to mention i've been totally unable to recover any data off of the drive after this happens, although i've yet to try the dd then replace superblock trick... this seems just horribly wrong for a seemingly standard setup with no extraordinary hardware in the latest non-beta kernel... As for the common recommendation of having backups, does anyone know of an inexpensive way to backup 40gb? I bought these drives with the hope of raiding them so that I would be protected from disk crashes, but now I have a whole new bag of worries (superblock weirdness, mis-syncing, massive filesystem corruption, etc) to keep me up at night :P -j -- -------------------------------------------------- [EMAIL PROTECTED] - 0xCD91A427 9907 3747 3CE9 11C5 2B1C F141 D09F 488C CD91 A427 Note: key id 0x299450B6 is lost and inactive. -------------------------------------------------- Copyright 2000 Jeffrey Paul. The information contained in this message may be privileged and confidential and protected from disclosure. If the reader of this message is not the intended recipient, or an employee or agent responsible for delivering this message to the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that any dissemination, distribution or copying of this communication is strictly prohibited. Thank you.