I used to have a similar problem not long ago.  Degrading the UDMA and 
DMA mode fixed the timeouts.
Or maybe it's just a faulty disk?

Miguel A. Caballero wrote:

>I don't have this computer near, i don't know if it make strange noises but i
>will see power saving options in bios. It hasn't made it another time. Can cause
>another problems this power save mode ?
>
>Thanks in advance.
>Miguel.
>
>Manuel Bouyer wrote:
>
>>On Fri, Oct 19, 2001 at 12:53:36AM +0200, Mailing list wrote:
>>
>>>Sorry by my poor english.
>>>
>>>Can be an advise of a malfunction of phisicall disk ?
>>>May I change this hard disk quickly ?
>>>
>>>Oct 19 00:47:25 trastero /netbsd:       type: ata tc_bcount: 65536
>>>tc_skip: 0
>>>Oct 19 00:47:25 trastero /netbsd: pciide0:0:0: device timeout,
>>>c_bcount=65536, c_skip0
>>>Oct 19 00:47:25 trastero /netbsd: wd0a: device timeout reading fsbn 8128
>>>of 8128-8255 (wd0 bn 422416; cn 419 tn 1 sn 1), retrying
>>>Oct 19 00:47:25 trastero /netbsd: wd0: soft error (corrected)
>>>
>>Does the drive make strange noises when it timeouts and recover ?
>>Do you have some kind of powersave feature enabled on this drive which
>>would put it in standby or sleep mode (some desktop PCs have this in
>>BIOS) ? This sleep mode the drive has to be reset to wake up. But the
>>kernel has no way to know that the drive is in sleep, so it tries a command,
>>the command times out and the driver issues a reset.
>>
>>--
>>Manuel Bouyer <bouyer@antioche.eu.org>
>>--
>>
>
>


-- 
Emre Yildirim <emre@asper.org>
GPG KeyID 0xF9E4A1D1 (keyserver.pgp.com)