Ext3 Journal corruption on hitachi deskstars

[greg.martin at ddos.com]

I recently came across an enormous cluster of x86 clone machines running 
fedora core 1 (2.4.24) which have typically all intel or amd have VIA IDE 
chipsets. 

They frequently experience corrupted journals rendering the ext3 partition 
in read-only mode.  More important than recovering the filesystem, I am 
interested in finding the root of the problem. 

The common hardware that all of these machines share is a Hitachi deskstar 
drive (New IBM drive)... 

Searching through the mailing list and google I have seen references to 
problems with this particular drive but for the life of me and (the broken 
redhat search tool) I cannot pin down specific information on the cause of 
these failures. 

A bug within the IDE bus driver and the harddrive, seems most sensible.  
Please help me find the right place to look. 

Thanks in advance, 

 -Greg 

 --
Greg Martin
Sr. Information Security Engineer
Melior Inc.
www.ddos.com