ASUS P5W DH Deluxe kernel panic ACPI & IDE controller is

Question

I recently built a new system with the ASUS P5W DH Deluxe motherboard.  Using the newISOs (both the new kernel and old) available on the forums I tried to install Arch only to be met with an extremely nondescript kernel panic (just a bunch of numbers followed by kernel panic).  After a bit of fiddling with it I managed to get the system to boot to the installation shell by giving it the "acpi=off" boot parameter.
After figuring this out I thought I was set, but I was so very wrong.  The IDE harddrive I was trying to install to was on the Jmicron JMB363 IDE controller that seems to have been hacked together and thrown in at the last second to allow 4 IDE devices in the system (something to do with the Intel specification for the 975X chipset I believe.)
Anyway, the system mounts my primary SATA harddrive "sda" just fine.  It then proceeds to load my two PATA DVD+RW drives: "hda" and "hdb" from the intel IDE controller just fine.  Then while trying to load the my PATA harddrive "hde" from the Jmicron JMB363 IDE controller, the installation slows to a crawl requiring several minutes before the system boots and throwing errors along the way.  The harddrive is also unusable in the system.  If I try to do something like "cfdisk /dev/hde" the system will hard lock and require a reboot.
Is there something I've configured incorrectly or is this perhaps a support issue with the Jmicron JMB363 controller.  Also, why do I need to turn ACPI off to avoid a kernel panic?  I should probably mention that there is a bios option that can be turned on or off to support ACPI 2.0 (disabled by default).
Thanks for any input!

Answer 1

I'm running archlinux on a P5W DH Deluxe.  Personally, I disabled JMicron in the BIOS as the drivers for it are pretty buggy from what I've read.  I'm just using the ICHR PATA/SATA Controller (I have an SATA disk and a PATA DVDRW).  I have it set to AHCI mode in the BIOS (this is the most compatible mode and faster for sata drives).  It might look like it's frozen during boot, but there is a device that causes problems and takes a minute or so for the kernel to give up on it and continue booting.
If you want to use the JMicron controller, there is a flag you can pass to the kernel in your grub menu.conf (I think it's "ALL-GENERIC-IDE" (no quotes) and you might have to pass "irqpoll" as well.  I got it working once but haven't used it for a while, so this may have changed.  You might want to look into JMICRON_PATA.
There are some issues with the linux kernel and the P5W.
The bridge between the ICHR to the EZRaid controller isn't recognized by the kernel yet, so it will give some error messages and with a few 30 second pauses between them (which is a pain... I don't know of a way to disable the controller though).  I've heard that if you attach a SATA hard disks to BOTH the EZRaid controller and the ICHR it's supposed to avoid it, but I don't want to install an extra hard disk.
The kernel seems to have have problems keeping time with the P5W.  I tried installing openntpd to help with it, but it only help a little... moving the clock by about 10 seconds every couple of minutes.  I found ntpd does a little better job (altering it by about 1 second every 5-10 minutes).  I think this is the cause of some glitches during video playback for me.
I haven't had any luck getting any kind of suspend working with the P5W.  It can suspend, but it won't resume.  Resetting the computer after a suspend makes it freeze just before you can access the BIOS screen.  The only way to recover is to turn-off the power supply on the back for a minute or so and starting it up.  It will run for a few seconds and shutdown (some kind of weird hardware reset?).  After that it will boot normally.
Let me know how your progress goes.  I'd like to know if you come across any fixes for the above.