Bad Secondary can lock up a box ?

[Andrew Mason]

Hi Guys,
Not sure if this is specifically Linux related , but I don't have anything 
with another OS to prove / disprove it so I'll enquire away.

I have a mostly faulty secondary HD which only just recently started spewing 
I/O errors. It's on the same PATA IDE channel as the primary HD.
Whilst trying desperately to copy over my SVN repositories the machine has 
hard locked a few times. The weird thing is, this happened to my fathers 
machiene a while back too. I didn't really put the faulty HD and the hard 
locking together as I figured the kernel would just ignore the dodgey disk 
and give up after a while.

So does anyone have an idea if the lock ups are caused at the hardware level 
(both boards were old MSI ones )  or at the kernel / driver level ?

I've never really had a stable Linux box lock up before. I know this is 
hardware related but i was still somwhat surprised it didn't just ignore the 
defective disk. 

Andrew