On Sat, 29 Jan 2005, Jeff Nelson wrote:

> A system I built about a month ago is hanging whenever I do any 
> significant disk I/O. In particular, the system will hang when I use tar 
> to transfer a bunch of files from an NTFS-formatted disk to a 
> reiserfs-formatted disk (using tar). This is a hard hang -- the mouse 
> pointer freezes and nothing except a hardware reset will bring the 
> system back.

I'd play with hdparm and turning down the I/O speed of the drive, to see 
if the problem goes away.  The other thing to check is to see if there's 
an updated IDE driver that might help.

Brian