> This means that the driver waited for an interrupt and it never happened
> (This is a known problem with the IDE driver under heavy load).

Excuse me?  Since when is this is a `known problem'?

The only time this has ever been reported with IDE disks, AFAIK, is
when a disk spins down (usually due to APM, but some desktops will
spin down the disk as well) in the middle of a transfer.  In this
case, the transfer is retried and unless you get a `hard error
{read,writ}ing fsbn ...'  message, you can assume that nothing was
lost.

Please do *NOT* start wild rumours.