yet another VIA IDE corruption (NOT Southbridge)

[Fuller, Rob]

I'm sure everybody is as sick of reading about these problems as I am,
but it is a pretty frustrating experience, and maybe another data point
will help.

I used my system without trouble for roughly two years
before enabling DMA in December 2001.  The DMA makes a huge difference
in terms of performance.  (No waiting for my keystrokes to display
during heavy disk IO.)

I have two Ultra-DMA hard drives on a Tyan Tiger 133 motherboard
(Tyan part S1834) with a VIA chipset and dual Intel Pentium III's.
Both drives are on the primary IDE interface.  I have the correct
80-wire IDE cables.  The system is on an APC UPS, and the network line
is filtered.  The memory in the system is fine (at least I never
see any unusual signals when compiling with gcc.)

I finally got bitten (by VIA? by Creative Labs? by Linux?) Saturday.
One of the two Ultra-DMA drives had two partitions each of which
had corrupt superblocks.  I tried to restore these two partitions
with their backup superblocks, and discovered massive inode table
corruption.  The root partition was about 50% recovered,
and the home partition was complete soup when fsck was done.

The second hard drive's single partition had a corrupt superblock.
The backup superblock was fine.  This drive was completely recovered.
I use it for mirroring FTP sites.  Thus, the drive is filled with .gz,
.zip, and .bz2 files that pass their integrity checks.  I don't think
I did much with this file system the last time that system was booted.

I re-installed Debian after the corruption.  Then I built and installed
kernel-2.2.21 in order to see if the "SouthBridge fix" would display
the message, "Applying VIA southbridge workaround."  The answer is NO.
I have the kernel built with PCI quirks included.  Perhaps this controller
ISN'T one of the suspected VIA parts?

Anyway, here are the PCI bus details:

00:00.0 Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82C691 [Apollo PRO] (rev c4)
00:01.0 PCI bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82C598 [Apollo MVP3 AGP]
00:07.0 ISA bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82C596 ISA [Apollo PRO] (rev 23)
00:07.1 IDE interface: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82C586 IDE [Apollo] (rev 10)
00:07.3 Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc.: Unknown device 3050 (rev 30)
00:10.0 Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation 82557 [Ethernet Pro 100] (rev 02)
00:11.0 Multimedia audio controller: Creative Labs SB Live! EMU10000 (rev 08)
00:11.1 Input device controller: Creative Labs SB Live! (rev 08)
00:12.0 SCSI storage controller: Adaptec AHA-2940U/UW / AHA-39xx / AIC-7895 (rev 03)
00:12.1 SCSI storage controller: Adaptec AHA-2940U/UW / AHA-39xx / AIC-7895 (rev 03)
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc: Unknown device 5144

This last device is an ATI Radeon 32 MB video controller.

Here are the hard drives:

/dev/hda:

 Model=QUANTUM FIREBALLP LM30, FwRev=A35.0700, SerialNo=186014438960
 Config={ HardSect NotMFM HdSw>15uSec Fixed DTR>10Mbs }
 RawCHS=16383/16/63, TrkSize=32256, SectSize=21298, ECCbytes=4
 BuffType=3(DualPortCache), BuffSize=1900kB, MaxMultSect=16, MultSect=off
 DblWordIO=no, OldPIO=2, DMA=yes, OldDMA=2
 CurCHS=16383/16/63, CurSects=16514064, LBA=yes, LBAsects=58633344
 tDMA={min:120,rec:120}, DMA modes: mword0 mword1 mword2 
 IORDY=on/off, tPIO={min:120,w/IORDY:120}, PIO modes: mode3 mode4 
 UDMA modes: mode0 mode1 mode2 mode3 *mode4 

/dev/hdb:

 Model=Maxtor 96147U8, FwRev=BAC51KJ0, SerialNo=N8058L8C
 Config={ Fixed }
 RawCHS=16383/16/63, TrkSize=0, SectSize=0, ECCbytes=57
 BuffType=3(DualPortCache), BuffSize=2048kB, MaxMultSect=16, MultSect=off
 DblWordIO=no, OldPIO=2, DMA=yes, OldDMA=0
 CurCHS=16383/16/63, CurSects=16514064, LBA=yes, LBAsects=120060864
 tDMA={min:120,rec:120}, DMA modes: mword0 mword1 mword2 
 IORDY=on/off, tPIO={min:120,w/IORDY:120}, PIO modes: mode3 mode4 
 UDMA modes: mode0 mode1 mode2 mode3 *mode4 

Please advise.  Do I replace the motherboard, the sound board, the OS?
There's really nothing else available I'd rather run than Linux,
but my files are kind of important to me :-)