As far as I can tell, nothing. When I plug in the hard drive after booting from usb (ie at normal desktop) without disabling it, no new dmesg shows up and the above code (meant to rescan scsi) does nothing. fdisk only shows the ram the live usb is using, the free few gigs on the usb, and my cdrom. Same with lsscsi.

Try #15. Yes, the init=/bin/sh goes anywhere on that line. (what it does is kinda 'cool'; web-research it!)
I'm really curious to see whether it's the ahci pata driver (compiled into the kernel vs. a .ko module) or udev/systemd/? doing this. (I wish I knew 'all' of how /sys/dev* {scsi,ata#,host#} {/delete,rescan,enable,*} works, but digging thru the kernel source code is beyond me currently, tho any GuruInfo is very welcome here!)

Realstically, I suspect the hdd is 'bricked' (although it makes a great learning experience or advanced hands-on cert test).

Try #15. Yes, the init=/bin/sh goes anywhere on that line. (what it does is kinda 'cool'; web-research it!)
I'm really curious to see whether it's the ahci pata driver (compiled into the kernel vs. a .ko module) or udev/systemd/? doing this. (I wish I knew 'all' of how /sys/dev* {scsi,ata#,host#} {/delete,rescan,enable,*} works, but digging thru the kernel source code is beyond me currently, tho any GuruInfo is very welcome here!)

Realstically, I suspect the hdd is 'bricked' (although it makes a great learning experience or advanced hands-on cert test).

Ooops, web-glitch dup and 'ninja'!

There's likely something to rescan for hotplug, but NewbieMe doesn't know it.

p.s. You don't happen to have a pata to usb adapter (for #15, reread more closely), do you?

Yeah enjoy learning more about grub and booting. Anyways adding the init=/bin/sh only worked when I included the libata.force=1:disable also. So I guess whatever libata is doing comes before the shell is initialized. I could even delete everything on that line (the file= and boot=) and still get a prompt, but again only if the libata parameter was included.

With the libata parameter the only thing that happens is:
[ 5.720082] ata1: SATA link up 6.0 Gbps (SStatus 133 SControl 300)
[ 5.722879] ata1.00: FORCE: horkage modified (disable)
[ 5.722883] ata1.00: unsupported device, disabling
[ 5.722886] ata1.00: disabled

So at least the 6.0 Gbps is correct.

edit: Ah, yes, I have an adapter actually..but I think it only does the 7-pin data line and not the larger power connection. Similar to this. The ones with both ports arent that expensive though it seems, maybe Ill snag one.

Huh? Do you mean it (the kernel) still hung/errors with init=/bin/sh appended? (no disable)
(My beloved init=/bin/sh ?always? "works", on any "normal" situation, I thought!)

Edit upon reread: oh, probably "yes".

I was afraid of that. Might a distro that has ahci as a loadable .ko help here?

IF we can *attach the bricked hdd*, should we file a kernel bug?

Well the efi was there too. You mean get rid of even that? It was:

linux /casper/vmlinuz.efi init=/bin/sh libata.force=1:disable ---

? Does init= do same hang/error from the bad hdd? Or a different "not work"?

Sorry, I know zero about EFI (but my wild-guess is that it's not related)

No, I meant just add it to end (leaving all the original, I thought wouldn't matter)

Other topic: can you download and put on USB, a different distro, with sata/ahci stuff loadable?
(I'm not sure what distro tho; not that 7mb mll I mentioned earlier: it has all compiled in, no modules).

Yes it was the same error when I did init=/bin/sh without libata.force=1:disable and bad hdd plugged in.

I'll browse distros a bit.

Searching LQ for libata sata ahci (&skipping titles about other devices) found this lsmod *debian*! And a scan here

Oh, searching the web for ?key? parts of your exact error msgs, *in double-quotes*, may find simlar situations

While looking for a kernel without libata built in I came across something. Libata is built-in to the kernel but ahci module isn't. That means I do

module.blacklist=ahci

in grub and like libata.force=1:disable the boot completes and drops me at desktop. However since ahci is a module I can reverse the toggle by just a

sudo modprobe ahci

and suddenly all 8 of my beautiful lost partitions populate the /dev folder. Now to see if I can mount any...

2 members found this post helpful.

Took a while for the damaged partition to mount but eventually was able to get all my important stuff transferred over to the new drive using normal means.

Just wanted to come back and say thanks for pointing me in the right direction.

1 members found this post helpful.

please mark your thread solved.
others will certainly benefit from this.