From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Johannes Stezenbach Subject: Re: ATA 4 KiB sector issues. Date: Wed, 10 Mar 2010 11:46:15 +0100 Message-ID: <20100310104615.GA23051@sig21.net> References: <4B947393.2050002@kernel.org> <1268031640.4389.11.camel@mulgrave.site> <4B94ACE8.4060400@zytor.com> <87f94c371003091446h62e50257qf884b278c69cfbfa@mail.gmail.com> <4B96E884.6050305@zytor.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Return-path: Received: from bar.sig21.net ([80.81.252.164]:57410 "EHLO bar.sig21.net" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1754591Ab0CJKqq (ORCPT ); Wed, 10 Mar 2010 05:46:46 -0500 Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <4B96E884.6050305@zytor.com> Sender: linux-ide-owner@vger.kernel.org List-Id: linux-ide@vger.kernel.org To: "H. Peter Anvin" Cc: Greg Freemyer , James Bottomley , Tejun Heo , "linux-ide@vger.kernel.org" , lkml , Daniel Taylor , Jeff Garzik , Mark Lord , tytso@mit.edu, hirofumi@mail.parknet.co.jp, Andrew Morton , Alan Cox , irtiger@gmail.com, Matthew Wilcox , aschnell@suse.de, knikanth@suse.de, jdelvare@suse.de, mkp@mkp.net On Tue, Mar 09, 2010 at 04:32:04PM -0800, H. Peter Anvin wrote: > > It can. The BIOS doesn't care about the partition table at all -- > all it does is load the MBR. A little story for your entertainment pleasure: I have a Gigabyte GA-MA78GM-S2H board, and during install turned off the power after partitioning but before formatting any partition because I got distracted by something else. Result: System could not boot anymore, BIOS hung before I could get to the "select boot device" screen. This also happened when I removed the hdd from the boot device list in BIOS. The last BIOS message was "Verifying DMI Pool Data" and you can find numerous similar reports by searching for 'gigabyte bios hang "Verifying DMI Pool Data"'. In my case it worked to switch the SATA mode from AHCI to something else, then wipe the partition table and switch back to AHCI. But I read on the net that some people had to format the drive in another PC, or hotplug it after the BIOS got past "Verifying DMI Pool Data". Johannes