sata on nforce3 - I/O error on device sda1 [SOLVED .. kinda]

[zaai]

Hi all,
I've just bought a samsung SP2504C, a 250GB SATA2 harddisk and installed it on my gentoo box.

Unfortunately it is not working very well. Partitioning the drive works fine but formatting a 30GB partition takes ages and generates a few dozen rather undesirable I/O errors in dmesg:
---
ata1: command 0x35 timeout, stat 0xd0 host_stat 0x21
ata1: status=0xd0 { Busy }
sd 2:0:0:0: SCSI error: return code = 0x8000002
sda: Current: sense key=0xb
ASC=0x47 ASCQ=0x0
end_request: I/O error, dev sda, sector 1124623
Buffer I/O error on device sda1, logical block 140570
lost page write due to I/O error on sda1
ATA: abnormal status 0xD0 on port 0x9E7
ATA: abnormal status 0xD0 on port 0x9E7
ATA: abnormal status 0xD0 on port 0x9E7
---

I've seen several posts about difficulties with sata/nforce3 but no solutions. Hopefully someone can shed some light onto this mystery.

Steps taken sofar:
1. Disable SATA-2, 3 and 4 disks in the BIOS and kept only SATA-1 enabled. (someone recommended to disable all unused drives)
2. Kernel 2.6.14-r4 recompiled for SCSI SATA.
The motherboard is a K8N Neo2, which contains a Nvidia Nforce3 chipset.
Enabled SCSI and Nvidia SCSI support as modules.
Disabled IDE SATA config.
3. Fired up the box and ran fdisk /dev/sda
Partitioned the hard disk into 4 partitions. First partition is 20GB
4. Reboot, dmesg shows:
---
nv_sata: Primary device added
nv_sata: Primary device removed
nv_sata: Secondary device removed
ata1: dev 0 configured for UDMA/133
scsi2 : sata_nv
ata2: no device found (phy stat 00000000)
scsi3 : sata_nv
Vendor: ATA Model: SAMSUNG SP2504C Rev: VT10
Type: Direct-Access ANSI SCSI revision: 05
SCSI device sda: 488397168 512-byte hdwr sectors (250059 MB)
SCSI device sda: drive cache: write back
SCSI device sda: 488397168 512-byte hdwr sectors (250059 MB)
SCSI device sda: drive cache: write back
sda: sda1 sda2 sda3 sda4
Attached scsi disk sda at scsi2, channel 0, id 0, lun 0
---
5. format the harddisk
# mkfs.ext3 /dev/sda1
It takes a few minutes to get the 'writing superblocks and filesystem account information", then it takes roughly half an hour to complete formatting, with about 42 of above errors.
6. Mount partition and copy a 5GB file to it
This takes about 5 minutes. Ctrl-C doesn't interrupt the copy process and dmesg shows the same I/O error 7 times.

lspci:
---
00:00.0 Host bridge: nVidia Corporation nForce3 250Gb Host Bridge (rev a1)
00:01.0 ISA bridge: nVidia Corporation nForce3 250Gb LPC Bridge (rev a2)
00:01.1 SMBus: nVidia Corporation nForce 250Gb PCI System Management (rev a1)
00:02.0 USB Controller: nVidia Corporation CK8S USB Controller (rev a1)
00:02.1 USB Controller: nVidia Corporation CK8S USB Controller (rev a1)
00:02.2 USB Controller: nVidia Corporation nForce3 EHCI USB 2.0 Controller (rev a2)
00:05.0 Bridge: nVidia Corporation CK8S Ethernet Controller (rev a2)
00:06.0 Multimedia audio controller: nVidia Corporation nForce3 250Gb AC'97 Audio Controller (rev a1)
00:08.0 IDE interface: nVidia Corporation CK8S Parallel ATA Controller (v2.5) (rev a2)
00:09.0 IDE interface: nVidia Corporation CK8S Serial ATA Controller (v2.5) (rev a2)
00:0b.0 PCI bridge: nVidia Corporation nForce3 250Gb AGP Host to PCI Bridge (rev a2)
00:0e.0 PCI bridge: nVidia Corporation nForce3 250Gb PCI-to-PCI Bridge (rev a2)
00:18.0 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] HyperTransport Technology Configuration
00:18.1 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] Address Map
00:18.2 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] DRAM Controller
00:18.3 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] Miscellaneous Control
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation NV25 [GeForce4 Ti 4200] (rev a3)
02:08.0 Multimedia video controller: Internext Compression Inc iTVC16 (CX23416) MPEG-2 Encoder (rev 01)
02:09.0 Multimedia video controller: Brooktree Corporation Bt878 Video Capture (rev 11)
02:09.1 Multimedia controller: Brooktree Corporation Bt878 Audio Capture (rev 11)
02:0d.0 Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL-8169 Gigabit Ethernet (rev 10)
---
_________________
* most bugs can be reduced to either dependency or state *

Athlon64 X2 4800+ on Asus M2N SLI deluxe with 4GB Dual channel
video nVidia GForce 7300 GS 512MB (snail); xorg-7.2
kernel 2.6.24-gentoo-r3

[Keruskerfuerst]

1. Could be the SATA cables.
2. Install the lastest kernel 2.6.15
3. Enable Nvidia IDE support
4. Enable SCSI support
5. Enable SCSI disk support
6. Enable AHCI support
7. Enable Nvidia SATA support
All compiled directly into the kernel.
8. Could be a defective SATA disk.

[zaai]

Thanks for the reply Keruskerfuerst.

1. Could be the SATA cables -> brand new cable, tried 2nd one, same problem
2. Install the lastest kernel 2.6.15 -> tried, same problem
3. Enable Nvidia IDE support -> not tried yet, isn't SATA supposed to use SCSI?
4. Enable SCSI support -> is enabled
5. Enable SCSI disk support -> is enabled
6. Enable AHCI support -> not tried yet, what does this do?
7. Enable Nvidia SATA support -> is enabled
All compiled directly into the kernel. -> tried, no difference
8. Could be a defective SATA disk -> brand new, could be but I hope not

(Btw, a 5GB copy takes over 20min, not 5min.)

Next step is recompile the kernel with AHCI and if that doesn't work Nvidia IDE support
_________________
* most bugs can be reduced to either dependency or state *

Athlon64 X2 4800+ on Asus M2N SLI deluxe with 4GB Dual channel
video nVidia GForce 7300 GS 512MB (snail); xorg-7.2
kernel 2.6.24-gentoo-r3

[zaai]

Solved, well sort of.

The MSI K8N Neo2 board has 2 sata controllers. Disabled SATA-1/2 and enabled SATA-3/4. Connected harddisk to the SATA-3 connector.

Problems disappears...

If someone needs more info, just ask.
Cheers,
Henk
_________________
* most bugs can be reduced to either dependency or state *

Athlon64 X2 4800+ on Asus M2N SLI deluxe with 4GB Dual channel
video nVidia GForce 7300 GS 512MB (snail); xorg-7.2
kernel 2.6.24-gentoo-r3