*SOLVED* Weird SATA "timeouts" with a via 8237

maxpenguin · n00b Joined: 05 Feb 2004 Posts: 25

Hi,

Not 100% sure if this is an issue related specifically to amd64 or not, but please bear with me

.

I have a amd64 3200+ with a Albatron K8x800 motherboard (via 8237 SATA chip) which I've just put in my machine after sending back my faulty gigabyte one.

Now this motherboard has the same chipset and exactly the same configuration as my old one motherboard except that its a differnt board from a differnt manufacturer

. The gentoo live cd used to boot perfectly (and my installed system worked perfectly) with my old system but now I get hdd "timeouts" even with the 2004.1 live cd.

I have 2x 160gig Segate SATA hdd's and during boot I get a line like this (still in the early kernel stuff)

hde: max request size 1024KiB

where it hangs for approximately 30 seconds then says

hde: lost interupt (and somthing about request timeout)

and it sits there complaining about every 30 seconds or so.

I've tried unplugging the SATA drives and it boots without a worry, then when I just unplug hde it does the same thing with hdg (the other sata disk).

Any ideas anybody? I wasn't able to find anybody with similar problems..

** Edit - The system works without a hitch on windoze xp **

peter96362930 · Posted: Sat May 08, 2004 5:22 am Post subject:

Do you mean that the same live CD worked ok with the old motherboard, but now it hangs while booting with the new motherboard?

Have you have a close look at the BIOS settings?

maxpenguin · n00b Joined: 05 Feb 2004 Posts: 25

Well - it wouldn't boot with the original boot disk that I used for my old system/motherboard (the release before 2004.0 I think

), so I grabed the newest live cd (2004.1) and the exact same thing happened. So it doesn't work on any live cd - with excatly the same result.

yes - I've had a very close look at the bios settings - I've tried changing everything even remotely to do with the hard drives, even disabled all of the on-board stuff (sound, network, com and parallel ports even all of the usb ports) - I've also tried the defaults and the turbo defaults.

Any ideas on what to try next? I'm out of ideas :cry:

peter96362930 · Posted: Sun May 09, 2004 12:42 am Post subject:

Seeing you said it works under Windows, my next step would be to try booting it using a Knoppix CD. If it boots with that, then you might be able to learn something from what it has done (dmesg). If it doesn't boot with that (so far I haven't found a system that doesn't boot with Knoppix) then I'm not sure what to do. Maybe try installing Gentoo without the SATA drives (assuming you have an additional disk) and build a kernel with support for it. Then you could try shutting down, connecting the SATA drives and booting with that kernel.

Another thought, does your motherboard have two pairs of locations where you can connect SATA drives? Mine does. One is controlled by VT8237 RAID and the other by Promise 20378 RAID.

maxpenguin · n00b Joined: 05 Feb 2004 Posts: 25

Gah

.. Here is a computer that doesn't boot knoppix

It actually gets past were gentoo stops, but then has a few pages of cloop -3 errors at pos xxxxxx (long string of numbers) at /dev/cdrom/KNOPPIX/KNOPPIX finally resulting in a kernel panic because it can't find init.

Although this seems like a problem with the cd rather than it not liking somthing on my system - and it does get past where gentoo stops.

I might download fedora or somthing later and try that too.

*edit* - oh there is only 1x sata controller and only 1 set of plugs on my board. **

peter96362930 · Posted: Sun May 09, 2004 2:15 am Post subject:

Sorry. I can't think of what to try next except to look at the options you can pass Knoppix on boot and see if there's anything can get around the problems.

Maybe downloading the latest Mandrake and trying that would be worthwhile. I think Mandrake's hardware support is very good.

radagast · Posted: Sun May 09, 2004 7:20 am Post subject:

i had a similar series of problems with my soltek motherboard.
it was the ram.
the ram.
my DDR400 (ie 200MHz clock) is only stable at 133MHz. that's two steps down. windows was ok (the odd blue screen, but we're used to that right?), knoppix was pretty good (though it crashed after long periods), there were some random errors (especially when the drives were RAIDed), and compilations always ended in a hardware hang.

it was the ram.
try running memtest.
you'll see.

andrew

insertnamehere · n00b Joined: 09 May 2004 Posts: 1

Try the smp kernel from the 2004.1 live cd.
Worked for me where the default kernel reported lost interrupts.

GentooBox · Veteran Joined: 22 Jun 2003 Posts: 1168 Location: Denmark

ryker · Guru Joined: 28 May 2003 Posts: 412 Location: Portage, IN

maxpenguin · n00b Joined: 05 Feb 2004 Posts: 25

!

Works fine with the smp kernel.. I'm such an idiot!

Thanks everybody SOOO MUCH!!!

!

ernstp · Posted: Fri May 14, 2004 2:18 pm Post subject: Better solution!

I had this problem too,
my solution: