paride error, aparantly with VFS

I appear to have found a problem reading from paride hard disks under
2.4.2

Reading from the raw block devices seems to be fine.

# dd if=/dev/pd/disc0/disc of=/dev/null
works.

However, accessing partitions on the device through VFS by mounting them
hangs the machine.

With vfat and msdos partitions: 
# mount -t (vfat|msdos) /dev/pd/disc0/part1 /mnt
and then
# cat /mnt/* > /dev/null
or
# dd if=/mnt/drvspace.000 of=/dev/null

I eventually see the following error message, and all logins are
unresponsive. I can reboot with SysRq.

do_pd_read_drq: status = 0x10050 = SEEK READY TMO

Doing a similar test with an ext2 fs on the drive:

do_pd_read_drq: status = 0x10052 = SEEK READY TMO

Changing parallel port mode in the BIOS does not make any difference.

The paride controller is a Shuttle EPAT plus. The parallel port is an
Intel 82371AB (I think)

-- Ferret