I've been using Slackware 8.1 with Linux Kernel 2.6.8.1 reliably for 6 months on my Dell Poweredge 700 using the included single SATA hard drive. I just purchased a Maxstore SATA drive and went through the steps to partition and format it. There were no reported bad blocks when I ran e2fsck (yep, it's partitioned type 83, formated ext2), so I figured that I should be "good to go." However, after it's mounted and I attempt to COPY an existing file from my boot drive/partition to the mounted directory, it locks up.

More specificly, the system will no longer be able to either read from the boot drive, write to the boot drive, read from the new mounted drive, or write to the mounted drive. While the result is observable, there is no error displayed or recorded; the later probably being the result of the problem I'm having.

Some relevent info from dmesg follows:

ata1: PATA max UDMA/33 cmd 0x1F0 ctl 0x3F6 bmdma 0xFEA0 irq 14
ata1: dev 0 cfg 49:0f00 82:0000 83:0000 84:0000 85:0000 86:0000 87:0000 88:0407
ata1: dev 0 ATAPI, max UDMA/33
ata1: dev 0 configured for UDMA/33
scsi0 : ata_piix
scsi1 : ata_piix
Vendor: ATA Model: ST340014AS Rev: 8.05
Type: Direct-Access ANSI SCSI revision: 05
Vendor: ATA Model: Maxtor 6Y080M0 Rev: YAR5
Type: Direct-Access ANSI SCSI revision: 05
SCSI device sda: 78125000 512-byte hdwr sectors (40000 MB)
SCSI device sda: drive cache: write back
sda: sda1 sda2
Attached scsi disk sda at scsi1, channel 0, id 0, lun 0
SCSI device sdb: 160086528 512-byte hdwr sectors (81964 MB)
SCSI device sdb: drive cache: write back
sdb: sdb1
Attached scsi disk sdb at scsi1, channel 0, id 1, lun 0

Any help or background information anyone can offer would be greatly appreciated.

Follow up:

Well, just found another way of locking up the system. Seems that when I query the drive using:

hdparm -tT /dev/sdb

it immediately fails, as apposed to what I get when querying the first SATA drive:

hdparm -tT /dev/sda

/dev/sda:
Timing buffer-cache reads: 128 MB in 0.29 seconds =435.44 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 64 MB in 1.15 seconds = 55.85 MB/sec

I find it hard to believe that it could be the new Maxtor drive causing this as I can apparently do everything to prep it for mounting.

Again, any help what so ever would be appreciated...