ATA Problems: Back in the Land of the Unhappy Camper

Well, it looks as if my problems weren't solved after all. I took out a Plextor PX-W4012TA and re-installed me cherished Plextor PX-W1610A---the latter burns at 1X, which produces glorious sounding CDs. Anyway, with this change, my problems have re-appeared. See the dmesg excerpt below. The short version is:
ata7.00: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x0 action 0x2 frozen
Now, at the end, I get:
scsi scan: 96 byte inquiry failed. Consider BLIST_INQUIRY_36 for
this device
Is this worth trying? If so, how do I try it?

It's possible, I suppose, that there's something wrong with this old drive. I have another one, I believe, at work, so I'll bring it home and see if it does better. But I wasn't having these sorts of problems before upgrading to Fedora 8 and so libata, so I'm doubtful that's it.

Anyway, thanks to everyone here for their patience and willingness to help.

Richard

=====

pata_amd 0000:00:0d.0: version 0.3.10
PCI: Setting latency timer of device 0000:00:0d.0 to 64 scsi6 : pata_amd
scsi7 : pata_amd
ata7: PATA max UDMA/133 cmd 0x1f0 ctl 0x3f6 bmdma 0xfc00 irq 14
ata8: PATA max UDMA/133 cmd 0x170 ctl 0x376 bmdma 0xfc08 irq 15
ata7.00: ATAPI: PLEXTOR CD-R PX-W1610A, 1.05, max MWDMA2
ata7.00: configured for MWDMA2
ata8: port disabled. ignoring.
ata7.00: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x0 action 0x2 frozen ata7.00: cmd a0/01:00:00:60:00/00:00:00:00:00/a0 tag 0 dma 96 in

        cdb 12 00 00 00 60 00 00 00  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
        res 40/00:02:00:24:00/00:00:00:00:00/a0 Emask 0x4 (timeout)

ata7.00: status: { DRDY }
ata7: soft resetting link
ata7.00: configured for MWDMA2
ata7: EH complete
ata7.00: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x0 action 0x2 frozen ata7.00: cmd a0/01:00:00:60:00/00:00:00:00:00/a0 tag 0 dma 96 in

        cdb 12 00 00 00 60 00 00 00  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
        res 40/00:02:00:24:00/00:00:00:00:00/a0 Emask 0x4 (timeout)

ata7.00: status: { DRDY }
ata7: soft resetting link
ata7.00: configured for MWDMA2
ata7: EH complete
ata7.00: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x0 action 0x2 frozen ata7.00: cmd a0/01:00:00:60:00/00:00:00:00:00/a0 tag 0 dma 96 in

        cdb 12 00 00 00 60 00 00 00  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
        res 40/00:02:00:24:00/00:00:00:00:00/a0 Emask 0x4 (timeout)

ata7.00: status: { DRDY }
ata7: soft resetting link
ata7.00: configured for MWDMA2
ata7: EH complete
ata7.00: limiting speed to MWDMA1:PIO4
ata7.00: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x0 action 0x2 frozen ata7.00: cmd a0/01:00:00:60:00/00:00:00:00:00/a0 tag 0 dma 96 in

        cdb 12 00 00 00 60 00 00 00  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
        res 40/00:02:00:24:00/00:00:00:00:00/a0 Emask 0x4 (timeout)

ata7.00: status: { DRDY }
ata7: soft resetting link
ata7.00: configured for MWDMA1
ata7: EH complete
scsi scan: 96 byte inquiry failed. Consider BLIST_INQUIRY_36 for this device
scsi 6:0:0:0: CD-ROM PLEXTOR CD-R PX-W1610A 1.05 PQ: 0 ANSI: 5

etc
etc

and then it just plain won't work, at least to write....

Hmm... libata definitely has some problem with mwdma support. We still don't know what. Till now, I've seen similar mwdma failures in pata_ali, pata_serverworks, pata_hpt3x2n and pata_amd. Some or all of them could be different issues but I think there's some common problem.

Can you read medias okay?

tejun