Re: AHCI errors on ICH10 board

[Volker Lanz <vl@fidra.de>]

On Montag, 16. März 2009 16:06:46 Jeff Garzik wrote:
> Your hardware is telling you that it is seeing CRC errors on the ATA bus
> -- which means to say, a hardware problem that causes data transfer over
> the SATA cable to fail.
>
> Possible sources of problems:  bad SATA cable, bad power supply, bad
> SATA port on device or mainboard, bad mainboard, ...

Faulty hardware is of course always possible. It's hard to imagine something 
is wrong with the hardware in this case, though:

* Both drives are affected, a Samsung and a Seagate. We can rule out the 
drives.
* Both drives worked in AHCI mode with the same cables and power supply with 
the ICH9 based Gigabyte board: We can rule out the drives themselves again and 
also the cables.
* Different SATA cables did not help. We can rule out the cables again.
* Unplugging everything in the machine except the drive with the root 
partition and the video card did not help: We can rule out the power supply (a 
high quality Tagan 400W model, not some OEM junk) with a near 100% 
probability, I suppose.

So, all that's left is the mainboard. But on this same machine, AHCI in 
Microsoft Windows XP works without any problem whatsoever. I know the old 
Linux-stresses-your-hardware-more-than-Windows tale, but I haven't seen proof 
of that for 10 years now. This finally seems to rule out the mainboard and at 
least to me it appears the software side is all that is left.

What can I do to diagnose this further short of buying an additional power 
supply and mainboard?

Volker