As long as the final set of tests pass, then no worries.

I have those messages there to help diagnose problems on the empeg peripheral bus (to which the IDE header is soldered).

It is rather curious that it shows 0080 on the data lines before the IDE drives finish their reset cycles. I see the same pattern here on the units I've looked at.

What's strange about it, is that 0080 is what the cs4231a chip is designed to emit when it is in "power saving mode".

I don't think this is a coincidence, and it may have something to say about how/why those cs4231a chips seem to fail for no good reason -- there may be a slight timing issue or something that causes them to try and drive the bus when they shouldn't be doing that.

Mmmm..