Can't Boot to IDE Card After Kernel Upgrade

userlander · 01-28-2009, 02:39 PM

I have 2 PATA hard drives on an IDE controller card, and I'm having trouble booting from them reliably. Anyone know how to do that?

The hard drive normally boots as /dev/sda2, but the kernel panic says something about device 8 (???).

Code:

kinit: unable to mount root fs on device dev(8,2)

With the motherboard IDE set to "disabled" in the BIOS, the device boots fine. But then I have no optical drives.

It worked before, because I burned a CD. Now I can either boot with no optical drives, or else I get the kernel panic. Does anyone have any suggestions?

userlander · 01-29-2009, 07:22 AM

Not one person on this entire forum uses an IDE card? wow, I knew I was special, but I didn't realize I was THAT special!

kilgoretrout · 01-29-2009, 07:33 AM

Post the following information:

1. The make and model of your ide controller card;
2. Your /etc/fstab file;
3. Your /boot/grub/menu.lst file which is your bootloader configuration file;
4. Which distro you are using;
5. The names of your old and new kernels;
6. The make and model of your motherboard and the chipset it uses.

Under the new kernel,the device file for your root partition and other hard drive locations are being designated differently when you enable your onboard ide port. You will probably have to edit your menu.lst and fstab file to reflect this change in order for the system to boot with the new kernel.

One other bit of information would also be useful. With the onboard ide port enabled, boot up and get to a grub prompt. Usually you can do this by hitting the Esc key and then "C" when you first see the grub selection screen but the procedure varies from distro to distro. The grub selection screen usually gives you what keys you need to get to a grub command prompt. At the prompt type:

grub> find /sbin/init

and hit Enter. That will tell you where grub thinks /sbin/init is under the new kernel. You error message indicates that this location has changed names with the new kernel and can no longer be found.

Finally, you will probably need to make some changes to fstab and menu.lst which may involve some trial and error and leave your system unbootable. In order to insure you can access your system in this event, you should have a livecd available that works on your system.

userlander · 01-29-2009, 05:05 PM

Someone responded, thanks! I am not getting any notifications for some reason, even though my options are set to get them.

grub> find /sbin/init says Error 15: File not found. I'm not sure it means much though, because it also says that when it can boot.

The IDE card is some syba card with Silicon Image SIL680 chipset. I flashed it to bios version 3.3.08, which I think has taken away the RAID function, which is good. The F3 message is not coming up anymore, at least (F3 to get into raid functions). But it still doesn't work as an IDE card, so that is not good.

The grub and fstab files are exactly the same as when it was working (except for the name of the kernel, obviously). The root directory is /dev/sda2, that's also how it's listed in menu.lst, and I can boot to it fine with the install CD using root=/dev/sda2. I've also tried changing it on the grub edit menu to sdb2, sdc2, sdd2, and sde2, all without success.

One time I booted with the main disk on the motherboard controller and the secondary disk on the IDE card, and it still said /dev/sda and sdb in the /dev/ directory. I booted a slax CD with both HDs connected to controller card, and it mounted the main drive as /dev/hde. So I don't know what's going on, to be honest. I'm using Arch linux, btw.

At first to get it to work I'm not sure exactly what I did, but I remember the regular kernel wouldn't boot (not kernel panic, but some other message just putting me at a ramfs prompt), so I tried the "fallback" kernel and that booted, so I reinstalled the kernel and that worked. I even burned a CD, so I know it was working.

Now neither main kernel or fallback kernel will boot - they both give the kernel panic message. I thought I would just get a non-raid controller and that might fix it, but after flashing this one apparently to non-raid, it still doesn't work. I'm not sure what to do next - did I cover all your questions?

EDIT: This is the IDE card (SYBA SD-ATA133R PCI IDE Controller Card):
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16815124001

and this is the motherboard (GIGABYTE GA-G31M-ES2L LGA 775 Intel G31 Micro ATX Intel Motherboard)
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16813128357

The new kernel is 2.6.28.2-1, and the old kernel was 2.6.28.1-1. in arch, uname -r just says 2.6.28-ARCH for all .28 kernels, so that wouldn't have told you much.

But all the designations are the same as the old kernel. I think what probably happened is that I got it working somehow with 2.6.28.1-1, and then without me noticing it broke during a reboot at some point. Then when I was in linux without it having recognized the optical drives, when I install the kernel and it builds the "hooks" and everything, it's building them wrong for when the BIOS DOES recognize the optical drives. Somehow I was able to get around that the first time, but I have no idea what I did other than have the same bios settings as now, boot the fallback, and reinstall the kernel. I didn't expect it to be this much of a hassle, TBH. Once I had it working I thought I had gotten it, and I would just keep that configuration. But the same configuration just isn't working now.

userlander · 01-30-2009, 01:06 PM

Solved. For some reason the OS couldn't boot with my zip drive slaved on the motherboard IDE channel. I switched that with my second optical drive on IDE2 of the card, and now everything seems to work. thanks for your time and response.

kilgoretrout · 01-30-2009, 01:29 PM

From what you describe, it's definitely a kernel issue and I would highly suspect your ide controller card as it's not a very high quality one, given the comments I saw on NewEgg. If you have windows installed, is the deivce working OK in windows?

A few general observations. The sdx, hdx difference in designations between slax and arch is due to the way they compile their kernels. Slax uses the old legacy ide modules which designates everything on the ide bus as hdx. Arch and most other modern distros use "libata" in their kernels which designates all drives, ide or sata, with sdx. The big problem is that ide support in libata, particularly for addon ide controller cards, really sucks.

I've run into this several times myself with my Promise Ultra 100 controller. I would strongly suspect you also have a libata problem. Typically, drives are detected on the ide controller card but libata sticks them in PIO mode(3MB/sec) and will not allow dma to be enabled on any hard drive connected to the controller. That problem has existed with libata for well over a year and correcting that bug has low to zero priority AFAICT. Apparently, IDE is considered a legacy system soon to be deprecated and no one is interested in working on it, particularlly for old ide controller cards. You see the same move on motherboards which will soon have no ide ports on them at all. Everything is going sata.

Back to your problem, since find /sbin/init came back blank, that demonstrates that either grub can't locate your root partition or arch doesn't have an init file in /sbin. I'm not familiar enough with arch to tell you; used to be that's where every distro had it but there are a lot of new init type sequences around these days. Try to find a file in your installation that you know exists. Grub should spit back something in the form (hdx,y). Compare that with your menu.lst entry for your root.

EDIT:Apparently you solved the problem while I was posting. I would be curious to know what type of speeds you are getting with hdparm on the drive attached to your ide controller card. Could you post the output of:

# hdparm -t /dev/sdx

where "x" corresponds to that hard drive.

userlander · 01-31-2009, 07:13 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by kilgoretrout

From what you describe, it's definitely a kernel issue and I would highly suspect your ide controller card as it's not a very high quality one, given the comments I saw on NewEgg. If you have windows installed, is the deivce working OK in windows?

A few general observations. The sdx, hdx difference in designations between slax and arch is due to the way they compile their kernels. Slax uses the old legacy ide modules which designates everything on the ide bus as hdx. Arch and most other modern distros use "libata" in their kernels which designates all drives, ide or sata, with sdx. The big problem is that ide support in libata, particularly for addon ide controller cards, really sucks.

I've run into this several times myself with my Promise Ultra 100 controller. I would strongly suspect you also have a libata problem. Typically, drives are detected on the ide controller card but libata sticks them in PIO mode(3MB/sec) and will not allow dma to be enabled on any hard drive connected to the controller. That problem has existed with libata for well over a year and correcting that bug has low to zero priority AFAICT. Apparently, IDE is considered a legacy system soon to be deprecated and no one is interested in working on it, particularlly for old ide controller cards. You see the same move on motherboards which will soon have no ide ports on them at all. Everything is going sata.

Back to your problem, since find /sbin/init came back blank, that demonstrates that either grub can't locate your root partition or arch doesn't have an init file in /sbin. I'm not familiar enough with arch to tell you; used to be that's where every distro had it but there are a lot of new init type sequences around these days. Try to find a file in your installation that you know exists. Grub should spit back something in the form (hdx,y). Compare that with your menu.lst entry for your root.

EDIT:Apparently you solved the problem while I was posting. I would be curious to know what type of speeds you are getting with hdparm on the drive attached to your ide controller card. Could you post the output of:

# hdparm -t /dev/sdx

where "x" corresponds to that hard drive.

No windows on this machine. By mentioning the slax designation, I was just intending to point out that it was calling it "e" instead of "a," not the hd/sd thing. I just thought that was weird, as I had never seen hde or sde before with only 4 total drives.

This thing about grub and init is bothering me, though. Even booted into the OS, grub> find /sbin/init gives the same error: File not found. But locate says it's there:

Code:

$ locate init |grep bin
...
/sbin/init
...

hdparm speeds seem pretty normal - what do you think?

Code:

# hdparm -Tt /dev/sda

/dev/sda:
 Timing cached reads:   8080 MB in  2.00 seconds = 4044.80 MB/sec
 Timing buffered disk reads:  168 MB in  3.02 seconds =  55.62 MB/sec

# hdparm -Tt /dev/sdb

/dev/sdb:
 Timing cached reads:   6880 MB in  2.00 seconds = 3443.30 MB/sec
 Timing buffered disk reads:  156 MB in  3.03 seconds =  51.56 MB/sec


# hdparm -i /dev/sda

/dev/sda:

 Model=ST380013A                               , FwRev=3.06    ,  
 Config={ HardSect NotMFM HdSw>15uSec Fixed DTR>10Mbs RotSpdTol>.5% }
 RawCHS=16383/16/63, TrkSize=0, SectSize=0, ECCbytes=4
 BuffType=unknown, BuffSize=8192kB, MaxMultSect=16, MultSect=?16?
 CurCHS=16383/16/63, CurSects=16514064, LBA=yes, LBAsects=156299375
 IORDY=on/off, tPIO={min:240,w/IORDY:120}, tDMA={min:120,rec:120}
 PIO modes:  pio0 pio1 pio2 pio3 pio4 
 DMA modes:  mdma0 mdma1 mdma2 
 UDMA modes: udma0 udma1 udma2 udma3 udma4 *udma5 
 AdvancedPM=no WriteCache=enabled
 Drive conforms to: ATA/ATAPI-6 T13 1410D revision 2:  ATA/ATAPI-1,2,3,4,5,6

 * signifies the current active mode

# hdparm -i /dev/sdb

/dev/sdb:

 Model=ST3160023A                              , FwRev=8.01    , 
 Config={ HardSect NotMFM HdSw>15uSec Fixed DTR>10Mbs RotSpdTol>.5% }
 RawCHS=16383/16/63, TrkSize=0, SectSize=0, ECCbytes=4
 BuffType=unknown, BuffSize=8192kB, MaxMultSect=16, MultSect=?16?
 CurCHS=16383/16/63, CurSects=16514064, LBA=yes, LBAsects=312581808
 IORDY=on/off, tPIO={min:240,w/IORDY:120}, tDMA={min:120,rec:120}
 PIO modes:  pio0 pio1 pio2 pio3 pio4 
 DMA modes:  mdma0 mdma1 mdma2 
 UDMA modes: udma0 udma1 udma2 udma3 udma4 *udma5 
 AdvancedPM=no WriteCache=enabled
 Drive conforms to: ATA/ATAPI-6 T13 1410D revision 2:  ATA/ATAPI-1,2,3,4,5,6

 * signifies the current active mode

I just put a new 640GB sata drive on my server:

Code:

# hdparm -Tt /dev/sda

/dev/sda:
 Timing cached reads:   852 MB in  2.00 seconds = 426.02 MB/sec
 Timing buffered disk reads:  266 MB in  3.01 seconds =  88.36 MB/sec

I knew sata was a little faster, but didn't realize IDE was that far behind in performance compared to the new drives. So it looks like I'm going to upgrade these old IDE drives pretty soon anyway, which is why I went with basically the cheapest IDE card I could find. I would actually recommend this one, newegg reviews notwithstanding. It flashed easily, and once the zip drive thing was sorted out, it's been working seamlessly. AFAIK, those aren't bad speeds for IDE. Sata is giving 35-40% speed boost though, which I would definitely like on the desktop.

Know anyone who wants a couple of *very* nice seagate 7200.7 IDE drives?