I just moved my system from a SCSI drive to an IDE drive. (I know I'm
moving the wrong direction for performance, but I don't care about that
right now)  
All seemed to work out fine.  After a bit ot troubleshooting and playing
trick-the-grub a bit my system boots and the bootloader even points to a
kernel that exists.  Now my problem is that since the HDD swap, whenever I
have moderate HDD usage, my CPU usage goes to 100%.  
So far this is what I know:
motherboard: soltek SL75DRV2 / Abit KT7 (both thunderbird processors with
VIA chipsets)
hard drive: IBM 07N9210 (80 gig 7200 rpm IDE) / Maxtor 40 gig 7200 rpm IDE
(model 6L040J2 ?)
running EXT3 on the drives.  behaves the same when the filesystems are
mounted as EXT2.  
running debian with kernel 2.4.19
I tried installing RH7.3 with kernel 2.4.18-10 onto one of the drives and
it does not have the same problem there.  I would, however, like to
contine using debian without having to reinstall the system.  
Any ideas of what would be causing this behavior?
TIA, 
- Kremer