Jeff Nelson wrote:
> A system I built about a month ago is hanging whenever I do any 
> significant disk I/O. In particular, the system will hang when I use tar 
> to transfer a bunch of files from an NTFS-formatted disk to a 
> reiserfs-formatted disk (using tar). This is a hard hang -- the mouse 
> pointer freezes and nothing except a hardware reset will bring the 
> system back.
> 
> There was an earlier hang that was resolved. When I was installing SuSE 
> 9.2 the system would hang while installing the software packages from 
> the DVD-RW drive. I goggled and found there is a known problem with the 
> ASUS A7N8X-E motherboard: the workaround is to add the boot option 
> "acpi_skip_timer_override". Apparently this is fixed in kernel 2.6.10, 
> but I haven't seen that available yet. I'm still running 2.6.8-24.10.
> 
> I've added just one PCI card, a Promise Technology disk controller, with 
> two disks (one on each controller). The motherboard primary IDE 
> controller has 2 disks as well; the secondary controller has just a 
> DVD-RW. The video card is an AGP GeForce FX 5500.
> 
> Here's output of lspci. Any suggestions appreciated.
> 
> Thanks.
> 
> -Jeff

Jeff,

If possible, install the NTFS drive(s) into a windows box and copy via 
samba.

I did this while converting a computer from windows to Linux and it 
works really well.

Good Luck.