Andrew Schepler wrote:
Robert Hancock wrote:
Sounds like you don't have the chipset-specific IDE driver enabled for your
hardware (I don't see any of them enabled in this list). I think that
IDE_GENERIC used to drive the controller in this case, but not anymore, as
it can only do so in a crappy, non-DMA way.
Thanks Robert.
After more research, I determined my motherboard is a Gigabyte
Technology GA-K8U-939. Its docs say it has a ULi M1689 chipset, which
supports Dual Serial ATA. So I tried enabling ATA, ATA_SFF, and
SATA_ULI. The kernel printed out a couple new lines about sata0 and
sata1, but didn't find any hd[a-d] or otherwise get any farther.
Then I tried just turning on as many chipsets as I could (skipping a
few whose help pages had dangerous-sounding warnings). Using this
kernel, the alim15x3 driver (CONFIG_BLK_DEV_ALI15X3) did manage to
find hda and finish booting. But I got several messages from the
kernel looking like:
hda: dma_intr: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
hda: dma_intr: error=0x84 { DriveStatusError BadCRC }
ide: failed opcode was: unknown
It looks like you're getting some CRC errors - could be you have a bad
IDE cable, or some other hardware problem, or (I would guess more
likely) the driver is picking the wrong UDMA mode or setting up the
controller improperly in some other way. As I mention below, you'll
likely want to try the libata driver instead.
Next I tried out Debian's
linux-image-2.6.28-1-amd64_2.6.28-1_i386.deb. It also loaded hda
using the alim15x3 driver, and gave the same messages as above.
Do those messages suggest the wrong driver is being used? That
there's a (not-yet critical) hardware problem on my hard disk, which
older kernels don't notice?
Now I'm going to go try some e2fsck -cc /dev/hda3 and/or badblocks -n
/dev/hda[12] to see if any disk problems turn up that way.
Attached is my dmesg from Debian's kernel.
If you're using a modern distribution, I would say you should try
disabling the old IDE drivers under CONFIG_IDE entirely, and try the
libata driver instead. This will mean all your drives will show up as
sdX instead of hdX, which may mean you need to make adjustments to your
boot setup (mounting by label or by UUID, possibly) so that you can
still mount the root file system.
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