Re: SATA/IDE Dual Mode w/Intel 945 Chipset or HOW TO LIQUIFY a flashIDE chip under 2.6.18

From: Jeff V. Merkey
Date: Tue Jan 09 2007 - 19:38:39 EST


Jeff Garzik wrote:

Jeff V. Merkey wrote:

Jeff Garzik wrote:

Jeff V. Merkey wrote:


I just finished pulling out a melted IDE flash drive out of a Shuttle motherboard with the intel 945 chipset which claims to support
SATA and IDE drives concurrently under Linux 2.6.18.

The chip worked for about 30 seconds before liquifying in the chassis. I note that the 945 chipset in the shuttle PC had some serious
issues recognizing 2 x SATA devices and a IDE device concurrently. Are there known problems with the Linux drivers
with these newer chipsets.

One other disturbing issue was the IDE flash drive was configured (and recognized) as /dev/hda during bootup, but when
it got to the root mountint, even with root=/dev/hda set, it still kept thinking the drive was at scsi (ATA) device (08,13)
and kept crashing with VFS cannot find root FS errors.



We have two sets of ATA drivers now, and Intel motherboards support bazillion annoying IDE modes, so you will need to provide more info than this.

Is the motherboard in combined mode?



Yes. "Enhanced mode" is how it is listed in the BIOS.


Combined mode is a technical term. Judging from your answers, you are not using combined mode.


native mode? AHCI or RAID mode?


No RAID, just enhanced mode (SATA 3.0 + IDE)


Judging from your answers, you are not in AHCI mode.

Side note: You should use AHCI if available. Emulating a PATA interface for SATA devices is error prone [in the silicon]. AHCI is native SATA, "enhanced mode" is not.


AHCI It is.

Jeff



The cannot-find-root-FS errors are definitely caused by driver and/or initrd misconfiguration. The melted flash, I dunno, maybe you managed to get two drivers fighting over the same hardware.


No. Seems related to the chipset problems. If I say "root=/dev/hda2" I have better not be getting errors claiming device 08:13 could not mount as root. memory corruption?


If the kernel cannot mount the requested root= disk, it tries the default that is encoded into the vmlinuz image at build time, which is probably 08:13.


The melted flash seems power related (like pin 20 was live for some reason on a standard IDE).


Probably, otherwise we would have many more reports like this than just yours.

Jeff




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