I'm in the process of upgrading an old Dell 486 from 1.3 to 1.4.1, but
so far I've not been able to get the ide drive working properly. It's
detected, I can fsck it, and do just about anything, but "tar zxf
base.tgz" hangs (in biowait) after a few extracted files. I don't have
any configuration output at hand, but the drive is a Maxtor LXT340A.

Does this sound like a known problem, and if so, is there a
workaround? I know there was some discussion about really old drives a
while back, but I couldn't find anyhthing interesting in the mail
archive.

I'll see if I can get a kernel with more debug info built tomorrow.

/Johan