IDE problems with an Athlon motherboard

[Shimpei Yamashita <shimpei@example.com>]

I'm trying to put together a box from scratch here, and am having a hard
time getting Linux to read from the CD-ROM.

Setup:
	Gigabyte GA-7DXR (AMD 761 chipset)
	  this board has 2 IDE controllers. I haven't put anything on
	  the second controller yet, though.
	Athlon 1GHz
	blank, unformatted 30GB UltraATA hard disk as master on ide0 channel
	Matsushita SR-85 DVD-ROM as master on ide1 channel

Symptom:
 The computer boots, and the BIOS screens show up properly.
 Both IDE devices got recognized once I remember to flip the
 master/slave jumper properly on the devices. I set "cdrom" to
 be in the boot device list, and stick in my Kondara 2.0 boot CD.

 The LILO prompt takes rather long to come up after the computer starts
 to read the CD-ROM--longer than it takes my piddling old laptop to do it.
 It eventually does--most of the time. Sometimes it requires opening the
 tray and putting it back in to get the drive to recognize the CD; sometimes
 I need to reset the computer and try again.

 Once I get it past the LILO prompt, the kernel loads, gets as far as
 putting up a blue screen [0] for the installer, tries to mount the
 CD-ROM, and fails with a series of kernel messages like the following:

<4>hdc: cdrom_decode_status: status=0x51 {DriveReady SeekComplete Error}
<4>hdc: cdrom_decode_status: error=0x34
   ... above two lines repeated several times
<4>hdc: ATAPI reset complete
<4>end_request: I/O error, dev 16:00 (hdc), sector 1182428
<4>hdc: irq timeout: status=0xd0 {Busy}
<4>hdc: ATAPI reset complete
<4>hdc: irq timeout: status=0xd0 {Busy}
<4>hdc: ATAPI reset complete
<4>end_request: I/O error, dev 16:00 (hdc), sector 1182352
<4>hdc: irq timeout: status=0xd0 {Busy}
<4>hdc: ATAPI reset complete
 ....
and finally
<4>EXT2-fs: unable to read superblock

I can think of several possible causes--
  IRQ conflict--likely, but I can't even begin to try to solve one
  bad drive--also likely, since I just got it today, but I want to be sure
		  first
  Linux doesn't quite support this board--unlikely, especially the IDE
		chip, since some people on the net do seem to be using this
		board with Linux
but I can't pinpoint the cause. Can anyone help me?

The kernel version on the Kondara CD is 2.4.4 plus some patches. The
exact same problem shows up when I try booting with Linuxcare's bootable
recovery disk, though, so I don't think the kernel version is the main
problem here.

-- 
Shimpei Yamashita                               http://www.shimpei.org/