I've got a machine with a P5A motherboard, which has an Aladdin 5
chipset. It's been running versions of NetBSD from 1.4 through late
current last year (somewhere between 1.4N and 1.4X--I don't remember
the exact version, sorry) without problems.

I just upgraded it to 1.5. I noticed some worrisome messages on
the console at boot about a read error and downgrading to UltraDMA
mode 2. But I reckoned these were harmless. (I didn't get them with
1.4, however.)

nfortunately, now it seems that these were not so harmless as I'd
hoped. I was just untarring a moderately large file (16 MB) when
I got:

tar: Could not create directory barcode/webserver/output/apache/include/xml : Input/output error

Now I can no longer log in to the machine. I'll have to wait 'till
tomorrow to see what's on the console, as it's at the office, but
I'm suspecting some sort of explosion in the IDE driver.

Does anyone know what might have changed that could cause this sort
of problem? Are there any patches I should be looking at trying?
(I'm not particularly interested in moving to current at the moment,
given that I'm wanting to move a CVS repository to this machine
and need a really reliable system.)

cjs
-- 
Curt Sampson  <cjs@cynic.net>  917 532 4208   de gustibus, aut bene aut nihil

She saw that he had singled her out from the three...for no reasoned purpose
of further acquaintance, but in commonplace obedience to conjunctive orders
from headquarters, unconsciously received by unfortunate men when the last
intention of their lives is to be occupied with the feminine.