Dear IDE maintainers, I recently installed Debian unstable on an old digital personal workstation 433au alpha (Miata) [1] with the default kernel 2.6.32 from Debian unstable. There were no obvious problems except for the tulip network driver which produced a lot of noise [2]. Joe Perches was so kind to provide a patch to reduce the noise. I applied the patch against 2.6.34-rc3 and rebuilt the kernel with the 2.6.32 Debian config using "make oldconfig". The kernel build took around 18 hours ;). Anyway, after rebooting the machine into the new kernel (2.6.34-rc3), the IDE driver obviously triggered a lot of errors [3] resulting in the kernel not being able to mount the root partition. The error message is always the same: hda: possibly failed opcode: 0x25 drive not ready for command status error: status=0x5a { DriveReady SeekComplete DataRequest Index } But please see the screenshots in [3]. The system finally dropped into a busybox. I issued a "reboot" and tried to reboot into the Debian stock 2.6.32 kernel. However, after the IDE problem with 2.6.34-rc3, aboot was unable to read the bootsector. When I powercycled the machine, I could reboot properly into 2.6.32 without any problems. I already checked the IDE cabling, the harddisk is new, btw. The problem reproduces every time I boot into 2.6.34-rc3. It looks like that some changes in the IDE driver between 2.6.32 and 2.6.34-rc3 somehow messed up the code on Alpha. I didn't test the whole thing on 2.6.33.2 yet, however the machine is busy right now building that kernel so I can try tomorrow. The lspci output of the hardware looks like this: test-adrian1:~# lspci 00:03.0 Ethernet controller: Digital Equipment Corporation DECchip 21142/43 (rev 30) 00:07.0 ISA bridge: Contaq Microsystems 82c693 00:07.1 IDE interface: Contaq Microsystems 82c693 00:07.2 IDE interface: Contaq Microsystems 82c693 00:07.3 USB Controller: Contaq Microsystems 82c693 00:0b.0 VGA compatible controller: Matrox Graphics, Inc. MGA 2064W [Millennium] (rev 01) 00:14.0 PCI bridge: Digital Equipment Corporation DECchip 21152 (rev 03) 01:04.0 SCSI storage controller: QLogic Corp. ISP1020 Fast-wide SCSI (rev 05) 01:09.0 Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation 82541GI Gigabit Ethernet Controller If you need anymore verbose or debug output, please let me know. Regards, Adrian [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Personal_Workstation [2] http://lkml.org/lkml/2010/4/5/104 [3] http://users.physik.fu-berlin.de/~glaubitz/alpha-crash/ -- 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