From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.2) Gecko/20040809 Description of problem: The Asus A7V133 motherboard has a built-in VIA IDE controller, that gets IDE devices hd[a-d], and a built-in Promise Ultra100 TX2 IDE controller, that gets IDE devices hd[e-h]. I used to have a hard disk in hda and one in hde, plus a CD recorder in hdc, and everything was fine. I had reasons to move some disks around, so I ended up changing the disk arrangement such that hde moved to hdg, hda moved to hde, and hdc (the CD drive) remained in place. Nothing in hda. No cable connected. Nothing reported by the BIOS. However, Linux wouldn't boot. grub would load the kernel, and the kernel would print the audit message and just sit there, waiting for someone to reach for the reset button. So I rebooted without quiet, and I could see that, right after probing the VIA controller, it started probing for hda, and it would get time-outs, and keep trying. There was nothing in hda or hdb. I don't see why it kept trying to find something there. I ended up moving the CD drive from hdc to hda, and then the machine would boot up fine again. Let me know if you need additional info to track the problem down. I can't get much more than the time-out messages printed by the kernel, but I didn't take note of them, so I'll have to change cabling again to get them. Let me know if it would help, otherwise I won't bother. Thanks, Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): kernel-2.6.8-1.541 How reproducible: Didn't try Steps to Reproduce: 1.Set up an Asus A7V133 with 2 HDs and 1 CD drive. 2.Connect the HDs to as masters in the Promise channels 3.Connect the CD drive as master in the secondary VIA channel 4.Try to boot 5.Move the CD to the primary VIA channel 6.Try to boot Actual Results: 4 hangs; 6 works Expected Results: I can't think of a reason for 4 to not be expected to work Additional info:
It should keep trying (although not forever) if it is sure a device is present, that may be because you have a cable but no drives, or because the bios entries said there was a device on hda that didnt exist. Otherwise I too would have expected it to skip the device. Does/did hda=ignore help ?
No cable. IIRC it printed hda=pio, as opposed to dma, which generally implies there's no disk there. But there used to be. The BIOS was in Auto-detect mode for primary/master, and it didn't detect anything at boot time, nor did it print disk info in the BIOS disk configuration screen, which implies nothing was set up. It might be that something was left over from the previous configuration, though. Hard to tell. I'll poke around a little bit and see if I can duplicate the problem again, now that there was a CD drive on that location. Thanks for the insights.
Moved the CD back to hdc, entered the BIOS to make sure the settings were right, and voila, it stops the boot again. Messages are like: hda: IRQ probe failed (0xfcfa) hda: no response (status = 0x0a) , resetting drive hda: no response (status = 0xa1) hda: no response (status = 0xa1), resetting drive the same messages are printed for hdb as well, regardless of whether I have hdb=ignore as well or not. It actually completes the boot after several of these, but it takes a while. hda=ignore and hdb=ignore, either or both, doesn't make any difference. Explicitly disabling the slots for hda and hdb in the BIOS settings doens't make any difference either.
Solved: just use these kernel parameters: hda=noprobe hdb=noprobe I got 10seconds delay and all boot faster. Before, I got 30 seconds for hda and 30 seconds for hdb It really speeds the boot process WFM Oliver
BIOS problem I believe not kernel. We only probe hda/hdb because the BIOS claims the slot may have a drive on it.
Having looked at some similar problems I'm going to close this one as the same. There are two variants of the problem I've seen 1. BIOS doesn't route IRQ for IDE if there is no drive on primary but doesn't mark the drive slots as empty 2. Similar but the IRQ is routed. Closing as "WONTFIX" but "NOTOURS" would be closer if it existed 8) You may find acpi=off helps but most likely not
I think comment #4 solves this problem. Maybe this bug should be marked as: WFM/WORKAROUND