SATA causing hard freeze on 2.6.6

[Daniel Drake <dsd@gentoo.org>]

Hi,

Since an IDE-->SATA converter was included with my motherboard, I decided to 
start playing with SATA.

The converter unit plugs into the IDE port of a hard disk, and you can then 
connect a SATA lead from that to a SATA port on the motherboard.

The hard disk I am using is a Seagate ST380011A.
The motherboard is an Abit NF7-S 2.0 (nforce2), which has the following SATA 
controller:
0000:01:0b.0 RAID bus controller: Silicon Image, Inc. (formerly CMD Technology 
Inc) Silicon Image Serial ATARaid Controller [ CMD/Sil 3112/3112A ] (rev 02)

Under 2.6.6, the entire system freezes under disk activity. It starts booting 
ok, but then freezes, usually when loading modules. Booting with 
"init=/bin/bash" allows me to get to a console, but soon after I start using 
the disk, the entire system freezes. I also tried 2.6.6-mm2 with the same 
problems.
Plugging back into IDE, and booting the same kernel works with no problems.

FWIW, my SATA experiences aren't much better with other kernels. When booting 
2.4.25 from a CD, I can mount my SATA disk but I get lots of messages, such as:
hde: sata_error = 0x00000000, watchdog = 0, siimage_mmio_ide_dma_test_irq
ide2(33,7):Removing [4428992 4467719 0x0 SD]..<4>hde: sata_error = 0x00000000, 
watchdog = 0, siimage_mmio_ide_dma_test_irq
done
ide2(33,7):There were 1 uncompleted unlinks/truncates. Completed
hde: sata_error = 0x00000000, watchdog = 0, siimage_mmio_ide_dma_test_irq
hde: sata_error = 0x00000000, watchdog = 0, siimage_mmio_ide_dma_test_irq

Booting 2.6.5 from a cd and mounting the drive gives the same errors. However, 
in both cases, reading and writing appears to be working (but I unmounted 
quickly both times incase the errors might be damaging the disk..)

Anything I could try?

Daniel