Re: [2.6.18,19] SATA boot problems (ICH6/ICH6W)

[Tejun Heo <htejun@gmail.com>]

Kovid Goyal wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I'm having problems booting from a SATA disk with 2.6.19.
> Grub loads fine, but when the kernel boots, it *sometimes* ends up with
> VFS: Cannot open root device "sda5" or unknown-block(0,0). 
> 
> This issue appears to be identical with the one reported in 
> http://lkml.org/lkml/2006/10/19/327 except that 2.6.19 did not fix it for me. 
> In fact, it made it worse. The timeouts reported in that thread are still 
> present and with 2.6.19 the fraction of unsuccessful boots has increased from 
> 30% to 80%. I often have to reboot my machine 3 times in a row before it 
> succeeds. I have tried both vanilla 2.6.19 and gentoo-sources-2.6.19-r1
> 
> To summarize: My machine stalls for nearly a minute on all boots and the root 
> filesystem fails to mount on 80% of the boots. This problem first manifested 
> itself when I switched to 2.6.18 and has become worse with 2.6.19. 
> 
> The controller:
> 00:1f.2 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82801FB/FW (ICH6/ICH6W) SATA 
> Controller (rev 03)
> 
> I don't know how to get the logs from an unsuccessful boot. Here is
> an extract from the logs of a successful boot (in which the timeout is 
> present):

Does goving back to 2.6.17 fix the problem?  Also, please report the
result of 'smartctl -d ata -a /dev/sdX' where sdX is the problematic drive.

-- 
tejun