PANIC , ide related (was lost interrupt hell)

Hi,

On the advice of members of this list, I downloaded 2.4.18, patched to 2.4.19-pre7 installed.

I enabled the via82cxxx option in ide config.

On bootup, just before the partitions are displayed, I get an oops at address 00000040, Null pointer dereferenced. Sorry, I was unable to get any of the other information it displayed :(

mike

Upgrading to 2.4.19-pre8 has fixed the below oops, however, the lost intrrupt problem is still there.

Details as follows :

Drives affected : Creative 5x DVD and LG CD-RW (in any slave/master/channel config)
I have replaced the ide cables, disabled/enabled dma, used the via82xxxx support, used the generic pci ide support, unmasked/masked the interrupt, in all possible combinations. There are no irq conflicts. The drives work perfectly in windows.

Replicating the trouble : try to rip any audio track from a cd using cdparanoia, cdda2wav, or even dd

hdparm brings up the following (for both drives):
/dev/hdb:
HDIO_GET_MULTCOUNT failed: Invalid argument

I/O support  =  1 (32-bit)
unmaskirq    =  1 (on)
using_dma    =  1 (on)
keepsettings =  0 (off)
HDIO_GET_NOWERR failed: Invalid argument
readonly     =  1 (on)
readahead    =  8 (on)

HDIO_GETGEO failed: Invalid argument
busstate = 1 (on)
HDIO_GET_ACOUSTIC failed: Invalid argument

Its the HDIO_GET_ACOUSTIC that puzzles me, as both drives rip audio perfectly under win98, but fill up my dmesg with "lost interrupt" under Linux.

This problem has been recurring with VIA chipsets throughout the 2.4.x series and searching the kernel listr archives shows a few other people having the same lost interrupt problem but not getting it resolved.

This is driving me crazy... can anyone suggest a fix or is there any information you need to assess why this is happening?

Many thanks,

mikeH