possible smartd race condition

[Gene Czarcinski]

I am experiencing indications by smartd of disk errors on one of my four 
systems running Fedora Core 6.  This has been reported and is documented in 
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=214502

This problem only occurs on one system and then only running FC6 ... running 
FC5 on that system has no problems.

The problem appears to be that smartd is attempting to access smart functions 
on the hard disks BEFORE it has enabled the disks for smart.  If I manually 
enable smart with:
   smartctl -s on /dev/hda
   smartctl -d ata -s on /dev/sda
   smartctl -d ata -s on /dev/sdb
then there are no problems.

This problem only occurs on an ASUS A8N-E motherboard with an Athlon 64 4400+ 
dual processor (running either x86_64 or i386 versions of FC6).

Has anyone noticed similar problems?  It is difficult to get something fixed 
if I am the only one seeing it (even if I can reproduce the problem).

What to look for in /var/log/messages ... something like:

  hda: drive_cmd: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
  hda: drive_cmd: error=0x04 { DriveStatusError }
  ide: failed opcode was: 0xb0

See the bz report for more info.
-- 
Gene