Hello! I can reinit the ata0 (no devices) and ata1 (a single DVD drive) without any problems -- they are both IDE (PATA). Reinit-ing ata2 (with one SATA drive) hangs the machine solid. Most of the time... This one time, however, it paniced and dumped core instead of hanging. Here is the debugging session (something is wrong with most of the stack): http://aldan.algebra.com/~mi/ata-crash-kgdb.txt Let me know, if you need the contents of other variables... I'm using 6.2-STABLE/amd64 as of March 2nd on a quad-core Opteron system with 4Gb of RAM. The system and home drives are SCSI, but this 500Gb one is where I keep my backups, pictures, and videos... The drive has recently developed a nasty habit of detaching (maybe, due to heat?) -- but interrogating it with smartmontools does not show any errors... Either way, the kernel is not supposed to panic -- there is not even any swap on the drive. Thanks! -mi