file system error

[Ronald G. Minnich]

can you try a few things: 
- do a raw dd command to the disk from /dev/zero and see if that works, 
e.g. dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda

- turn off UDMA, in fact turn off ALL dma at first
- try to make it run totally PIO

This is weird, but it does seem like some kind of DMA problem.

Also, boot under the normal bios and do an lspci -xxx and then do an lspci 
-xxx under linuxbios and see if you see any IDE setup differences.

ron