Hi again, To give some more information on what I've done. I installed using the 20090526 Gentoo autobuild. The livecd gave no errors during the process. The drive I installed on is a Seagate 160Gb SATA 7200RPM HDD. The motherboard is a Gigabyte EP45-DQ6. The CPU is an Intel Q6600. All motherboard settings are standard, and AHCI/RAID is disabled in the BIOS due to an existing Windows installation. I have tried other cables for the hard drives. I have tried enabling AHCI (it is enabled in the Kernel - 2.6.29-gentoo-r5), also to no avail. To recap, the messages when booting into my system look like: ata1: link is slow to respond, please be patient (ready=0) ata1: softreset failed (device not ready) ata1: SATA link up 3.0 Gbps (SStatus 123 SControl 300) ata1: link online but device misclassified, retrying ata1: link is slow to respond, please be patient (ready=0) ata1: softreset failed (device not ready) ata1: SATA link up 3.0 Gbps (SStatus 123 SControl 300) ata1: link online but device misclassified, retrying ata1: link is slow to respond, please be patient (ready=0) ata1: softreset failed (device not ready) ata1: SATA link up 3.0 Gbps (SStatus 123 SControl 300) ata1: link online but device misclassified, retrying ata1: limiting SATA link speed to 1.5 Gbps ata1: softreset failed (device not ready) ata1: SATA link up to 1.5 Gbps (SStatus 113 SControl 310) ata1: link online but device misclassified, device detection might fail ata2: link is slow to respond, please be patient (ready=0) ata2: softreset failed (device not ready) ... (as with ata1) This whole process takes over a minute, with each message group (link slow..retrying) taking 10-15s. After these messages, the system boots successfully and it appears I can use it as normal. As a side note, the drives also appear to be working in Windows 7, but I don't know if there is a way to check the link speed. I guess my questions are: - have I done something horridly wrong, e.g. missing a Kernel/BIOS option somewhere? - could this be an anomaly with this specific Kernel version (I think this likely, given that the livecd didn't complain) - maybe it is a BIOS issue and I need to find an update from the manufacturer Thanks in advance.. -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-ide" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
