If you have an Intel ICH6M-based SATA controller, and you use Fedora Core 4, you may be seeing a problem like this. My ThinkPad T43 won’t record at full speed to CD-R, nor read back at full speed, which is somewhat of an annoyance. Fortunately, John Linville at Red Hat has a patch available to fix the problem, which I have incorporated into my own kernels:
Binary package - kernel-2.6.12-1.1456_FC4.pfrields.1.i686.rpm
Binary Xen0 Package - kernel-2.6.12-1.1456_FC4.pfrields.1xen0.i686.rpm
Binary XenU Package - kernel-2.6.12-1.1456_FC4.pfrields.1xenU.i686.rpm
Source package - kernel-2.6.12-1.1456_FC4.pfrields.1.src.rpm
If you use my Fedora RPM repository, you’ll be able to simply “yum update” to fix this problem. I’ve signed the packages, and I haven’t made any other changes outside the libata patch. You may also need to add the following parameters to your kernel boot line in /boot/grub/grub.conf:
ide0=noprobe ide1=noprobe
If you already use the “development” or Rawhide repositories, you’re on your own, but you’ll find the patch in the bug listing above. Also, I only made the “up” (uniprocessor) kernel, so if you have a SMP machine, you’ll need to pull the .src.rpm package, and change line 9 and 10 to read:
%define buildup 0
%define buildsmp 1
Then rebuild with rpmbuild -bb --target=i686 RPMSPECDIR/kernel-2.6.spec. (If you don’t want to build the Xen stuff, change line 12 to %define includexen 0.)