[mythtv-users] OT: SATA errors

[Harry Devine]

Brian Wood wrote:
> On Thursday 09 July 2009 20:19:34 Harry Devine wrote:
>
>   
>> The MB is an Asus A8N32-SLI Deluxe with an nVidia nForce4 SLI x16
>> chipset (from the MB manual).  I have an nVidia GeForce 9400GT video
>> card in the PCI-e slot and a pcHDTV5500 tuner card in one of the regular
>> PCI slots.  Both are working fine.  The SATA ports are on the MB itself
>> as I mentioned earler.
>>     
>
> Can you look at your bootlog? Make sure it looks like yout SATA controllers 
> are being recognized and initialized properly?
>
> I'm not familiar with that precise chipset, though I have had good luck with 
> some of its progenitors. 
>
> It would be interesting to know if things work OK with a PATA drive, perhaps 
> you could run the OS on that one and be able to give a good workout/test to a 
> SATA drive connected as a non-system drive.
>
> Asus generally makes decent boards. Make sure you have the latest BIOS 
> installed, sorry if that's obvious. I also assume (obviously) that you are 
> not overclocking and all timings are at default settings.
>
> Also check for interrupt conflicts.
>
>   
I'm not sure where the bootlog is, but I was able to mount the /var 
partition and looked at /var/log/messages.  I do see a lot of messages 
like so:

Jul 6 22:41:12 hdevine-desktop kernel: [1429202.244693] ata1: hard 
resetting link
Jul 6 22:41:12 hdevine-desktop kernel  [1429207.386529] ata1: failed due 
to HW bug, retry pmp=0
Jul 6 22:41:12 hdevine-desktop kernel [1429207.560531] ata1: SATA link 
up 1.5 Gbps (SStatus 113 SControl 310)
Jul 6 22:41:12 hdevine-desktop kernel [1429207.569392] ata1.00:SB600 
AHCI: limiting to 255 sectors per cmd
Jul 6 22:41:12 hdevine-desktop kernel [1429207.570139] ata1.00:SB600 
AHCI: limiting to 255 sectors per cmd
Jul 6 22:41:12 hdevine-desktop kernel [1429207.570145] ata1.00: 
configured for UDMA/33
Jul 6 22:41:12 hdevine-desktop kernel [1429207.570162] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] 
Result: hostbyte=DID_OK driverbyte=DRIVER_SENSE,SUGGEST_OK
Jul 6 22:41:12 hdevine-desktop kernel [1429207.570162] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] 
Sense Key: Aborted Command [current][descriptor]

This went on for a while, probably until I rebooted and had problems 
booting up.  This seems to point to a SATA issue on the MB, but I can't 
seem to figure out why I can see the drive on the SATA bus from the 
LiveCD, but can't boot from it.  Very strange, but I'm probably missing 
something.

Also, I checked on the Asus website and they give version 1409 as the 
BIOS firmware.  Well, I have 2201, so I have the latest from what I can 
gather.

Thanks,
Harry