Sata controllers fail on boot

Chaos5522 · n00b Joined: 05 Feb 2009 Posts: 10

Recently I decided to shuffle a bunch of my old hardware around so I could build my roommate a new PC. I rebuilt my media server and went to install gentoo on it. It fails to boot the newest minimal install cd. sata_sil hangs but finally loads, then the system hangs at scsi_wait_scan, it spits out a whole string of errors (I'm at work right now and not in front of my PC at home) and finally settles into a pattern of reporting failures for incrementing scsi IDs...

The irritating thing is that it works absolutely perfectly with the 2008.0 minimal CD....

I built a kernel using one of Pappy's seeds, included the controller support i needed into the kernel instead of as a module, but it still does the same thing when I boot.

The system is:
Intel STL2 motherboard (onboard SCSI is disabled in the BIOS)
Sil3112 2 port SATA controller
Intel SRCS14L SATA RAID controller
Broadcom Chipset/IDE controller

I'll provide some specific errors when I get a chance, but I was curious if anyone knew of any issues with the gdth and sata_sil drivers with 2.6.31-gentoo-r6 off the top of their heads.

Chaos5522 · n00b Joined: 05 Feb 2009 Posts: 10

I forgot to mention, I'm not actually booting off of either of the SATA controllers. I have a 40Gb HD connected to the motherboard that I'm booting off of. I've spent enough time playing with booting from RAID to know not to bother with it.

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Fri Feb 05, 2010 9:55 pm Post subject:

Chaos5522,

The Sil3112 2 port SATA controller is just that, a 150Gb/sec SATA controller. Any raid it may have in its name can be ignored.
Its fakeraid. You can use it in either its ordinary SATA mode, in which case it works fine for the boot device, or you can use it in fakeraid mode, in which case you need dmraid support in your initrd as dmraid cannot be built into the kernel.
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

Chaos5522 · n00b Joined: 05 Feb 2009 Posts: 10

I'm perfectly aware of that...RAID is not the issue. The issue is that when sata_sil, gdth, and especially scsi_wait_scan load, either compiled into the kernel or as modules, the system hangs for a long time, spits out timeout errors. With a genkernel generated kernel, the system will, eventually, get me to a login prompt, but with a kernel built from a kernel seed it ends up in a kernel panic...not sure how long that takes, the only times it's happened is when I leave it running overnight.

The frustrating part is that I have had both controllers running in Gentoo in different systems and the 2008.0 install CD loads all three perfectly.

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Sat Feb 06, 2010 11:17 am Post subject:

Chaos5522,

I have a system that uses SIL3112 SATA, I can post a kernel config if you like.
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.