System unresponsive during HDD activity

[Gilboa Davara]

On Fri, 2010-09-17 at 10:09 -0700, Konstantin Svist wrote:
> On 09/17/2010 07:40 AM, Gilboa Davara wrote:
> > Are you using SATA drive, or IDE?
> > Assuming the former, does it use native SATA / AHCI or IDE-compatible
> > mode?
> >
> >
> 
> Pretty sure it's SATA:
> 
> Sep 16 19:48:47 mireille kernel: ata1: SATA max UDMA/133 cmd 0x1f0 ctl 
> 0x3f6 bmdma 0xbfa0 irq 14
> Sep 16 19:48:47 mireille kernel: ata1.00: ATA-8: FUJITSU MHW2160BJ FFS 
> G2, 0085001C, max UDMA/100
> Sep 16 19:48:47 mireille kernel: ata1.00: 312581808 sectors, multi 8: 
> LBA48 NCQ (depth 0/32)
> Sep 16 19:48:47 mireille kernel: ata1.00: configured for UDMA/100
> 
> 

Strike that.
Your SATA seems to be configured to work in IDE compatibility mode.
Trying rebooting the machine, going into the BIOS and changing the
configuration of your SATA chipset to AHCI (also called "native" mode).

- Gilboa
P.S. If your CDROM sits on the same chipset as the HD, switching from
IDE mode to AHCI will most likely prevent you from booting from CDROM or
DVD. Make sure you disable it everytime you want to boot from CDROM or
DVD.