nForce 4 Kernel Panic (DMA Problems)

[Nathaniel Husted]

Hardware:
Athlon64 3700+
MSI K8N Neo4-F Motherboard
1GB PC3200 Ram (memtest86+ says everythings fine. 2 successful tests)
1 120GB WD HD (Master; Secondary Controller)
16x16 Pacific Digital DVD-RW ( Slave; Secondary Controller)
2 15GB WD HD (One with linux one with windows. Windows = master, Linux
= Slave. Both on primary controller)
XFX Geforce 6600GT Video Card
450 Watt Power Supply

Software:
Fedora Core 3 x86_64
kernel-2.6.11-1.14_FC3 (the 2.6.11-1.27 kernel doesn't help either)
kernel-module-ntfs-2.6.11-1.14_FC3-2.1.22-0.lvn.1.3
kernel-module-nvidia-2.6.11-1.14_FC3-1.0.7174-0.lvn.1.3
kernel-utils-2.4-13.1.49_FC3
kernel-2.6.9-1.667 (installed but not booted from)

----------------------------------------------------

Problem:
This seems to happen to me with every distribution. The computer will
either lock up or display a kernel panic. In redhat the kernel panics
right at the beginning of the boot process, about where it detects
hardware. The magic tonic to solve the problem is starting the kernel
with ide=nodma in the case of redhat or whoever else to do that in the
other distrobutions. As I was browsing through the nforce driver
install at Nvidia's site I saw the the known issue section that some
older distributions may not have support for DMA unless you modify the
PCI tables in the amd74xx.c (I think that's the name) file in the
kernel source. Well the blurb of information there gives absolutly no
hint about the nforce4 motherboard and when checking the kernel source
of the latest kernel I see no mention of nforce4. Does the kernel not
yet support dma on nforce4 motherboards? Could it just be the ata
controller on this board?

Another problem I have run into involves ghost and dd. If I start up
BartPE to run ghost 8.0 (I'm saving the image on a ntfs partition) it
will not ghost the linux hard driver. It starts and then BSODs BartPE.
The same happens using the ext2/3 windows file system drivers with
windows. If I try and read a file from the drive it BSODs (ntfs linux
driver reads from my ntfs drives just fine). dd on the other hand when
being run from Helix 1.6 will hang right after starting. It basically
will freeze the whole system. The if parameter is set to the linux hd
and the of paremeter is set to a Samba share on another computer.

DMA works fine under WindowsXP and I do not have any problems unless I
install Nvidia's SW IDE Drivers (The system will automatically BSOD
and reset before getting past the windows start screen... even in safe
mode after a while). I am unsure what to do and I am rather
apprehensive about sending in my motherboard for a replacement
(although I might just have to if it turns out to be hardware
related).

I'm fine manually patching the kernel sourcecode if someone can point
towards decent enough instructions. If there is a modified unofficial
kernel (preferably in a binary format) that fixes this problem I'd be
ok with that too.

Thanks for any help,
Nathaniel Husted