I managed to fix the most prevalent issues with the changeset:
<http://gerrit.rockbox.org/r/218>

However, I just observed a panic which may be related to the oddity I
pointed out in my previous mail:

> Furthermore noticed the following oddity in the
> ata.c:ata_transfer_sectors code […]
> So basically, after a perform_soft_reset has taken place, one
> deterministically exits with an error without seeing whether it
> actually helped.

I got a *PANIC* with flush_fat_sector() - Could not write sector 40883
(error -5) in the middle of playback, which indicates that a read/write
timed out.

I am currently waiting for a build to see whether a larger
READWRITE_TIMEOUT helps here. If so, I would suggest to change the code
to wait a shorter time in the first run and to wait only on the second
run the full 30 seconds after a transfer has been started. This would
mitigiate possible lags. However, I'm not deep enough in the ATA matter
to see whether that actually makes sense.
Can someone give me a hint here?

best regards,
Jonas
Received on 2012-04-17