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Having trouble installing a piece of hardware? Want to know if that peripheral is compatible with Linux?

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Old 12-02-2005, 10:35 AM   #1
jtison
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Registered: Dec 2005
Location: Connecticut, USA
Distribution: Fedora Cores 9, 10, 15, 17; SLES 10 & 11; RHEL 6.x
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Angry Newbie to IDE (long, sorry)


I've been running Linux since about 1996. My principal machine I/O systems have always been SCSI. I'm abandoning SCSI now -- not because I want to -- but because I'm increasingly getting priced out of the peripheral market. It seems like little (particularly U320/U160) is backwards compatible with my dead & dying Adaptec controllers, and the "known working" combinations of drives, cables, and controllers ain't cheap enough any more to keep my family fed.

Hardware:
Soyo KT400 Dragon (Black)
AMD Athlon XP 2800+, 333 FSB
Memory: 2 GB PC2700
I/O: Adaptec 2940UW, 6 IBM 9.1 GB Ultra SCSI DGHS (going out the door if I can ever get it done), and a bunch of SCSI devices I guess I'm gonna have to live without now (like a DDS3 DAT drive , and a nice HP CD-RW)
Video: ATI Radeon 9500/256 MB
Distro/System:
Red Hat Linux 9.0
2.4.20-30.9 #1 Wed Feb 4 20:45:39 EST 2004 i686 athlon i386 GNU/Linux

Yeah, I know. My kernel/distro are old. I'll upgrade if I see I need to, and I'm wondering if this doesn't have something to do with my saga. Instinct tells me not, though.

Ran down to Circuit City and picked up an Western Digital WD800JB (see review in the HCL) for $80 to see if I could hook it up on the on-mobo IDE controller. 80 GB is more than I need for my purposes (I could get away with 45 GB if I had to). Cabled the drive up, partitioned it (into 7 or 8 partitions), ran mke2fs -j on all of them (except for the intended swap partition). Everything looked good to that point.

Started copying off the SCSI mount points onto the IDE. This looked good, too. I hadn't yet tweaked DMA settings or anything else in the BIOS (other than turning on IDE channel 0 and having the BIOS detect the drive parameters).

I got all the way through the copying of about 20 GB of data without any complaint from the IDE subsystem, although I was getting the now usual SCSI subsystem complaints about unexpected busfrees, etc. These SCSI error messages have been growing in number, severity, and frequency; which is why I'm in a panic to get off of them NOW.

Next step in the verification: swap out a SCSI mount point for an IDE mount point and see how it looks ... try to run with it. OK, umount /home;mount /dev/hda5 /home. Now I start getting serious messages from the ide subsystem ... to the order of things like this:

Dec 2 08:25:08 rutabaga kernel: hda: dma_timer_expiry: dma status == 0x21
Dec 2 08:25:18 rutabaga kernel: hda: error waiting for DMA
Dec 2 08:25:18 rutabaga kernel: hda: dma timeout retry: status=0x58 { DriveReady SeekComplete DataRequest }
Dec 2 08:25:18 rutabaga kernel:
Dec 2 08:25:38 rutabaga kernel: hda: dma_timer_expiry: dma status == 0x21
Dec 2 08:25:48 rutabaga kernel: hda: error waiting for DMA
Dec 2 08:25:48 rutabaga kernel: hda: dma timeout retry: status=0x58 { DriveReady SeekComplete DataRequest }

At that point, I can use hdparm and smartctl to review the drive status: DMA's been shut off all the way, I'm down to PIO mode 4, and I'm still taking I/O ("uncorrectable error", followed by a sector number) errors.

OK, after calming down, I figured out it's gotta be all about bad blocks. Here's where I find out that IDE has no SCSI-like low-level format utility , no hardware sector remapper (at least that I can find).

I guess I'm stuck to having the Linux filesystem drivers do what they can do with bad block remapping. The first -cc run with mke2fs took almost three full hours (!!!). Oh boy. So I get all the way through the formatting run with -cc on ... dumpe2fs -b ... guess what? NO BAD BLOCKS reported. Ay yi yi. I'm gonna toy around with this disk for an hour or two more, but it's headed back to Circuit City for an exchange, methinks.

Here's the lspci output that the thread top asked for:
00:00.0 Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8377 [KT400 AGP] Host Bridge
00:01.0 PCI bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8235 PCI Bridge
00:08.0 Multimedia video controller: Brooktree Corporation Bt878 Video Capture (rev 11)
00:08.1 Multimedia controller: Brooktree Corporation Bt878 Audio Capture (rev 11)
00:09.0 Multimedia audio controller: Ensoniq ES1370 [AudioPCI]
00:0a.0 SCSI storage controller: Adaptec AHA-2940U/UW/D / AIC-7881U
00:0c.0 Ethernet controller: National Semiconductor Corporation DP83815 (MacPhyter) Ethernet Controller
00:10.0 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. USB (rev 80)
00:10.1 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. USB (rev 80)
00:10.2 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. USB (rev 80)
00:10.3 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. USB 2.0 (rev 82)
00:11.0 ISA bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8235 ISA Bridge
00:11.1 IDE interface: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82C586/B/686A/B PIPC Bus Master IDE (rev 06)
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc: Unknown device 4153
01:00.1 Display controller: ATI Technologies Inc: Unknown device 4173


Have tried turning APIC off at the BIOS level and as a kernel parm ... no difference. Have used hdparm to switch DMA, UDMA, and PIO modes ... some settings are better than others, but nothing is a savior. I think I've cost Google megabucks over the last couple of days in machine cycles ... in desperation, I'm coming here (a newbie to this forum, but you guys have a good rep out there). The answer's probably so simple that I can't see it.

Anybody got any ideas for me? Is this what I have to look forward to living with IDE?

Thanks, folks ...
--Jim--
 
Old 12-02-2005, 09:19 PM   #2
jtison
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Registered: Dec 2005
Location: Connecticut, USA
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It's not the drive

Bleh. It's [b]NOT[b] the drive. Just went down and exchanged it for a brand new one, same model. Same results.

An attempt to install FC 4 yields the same kind of result ...
Code:
ide0: Wait for ready failed before probe!
... this after a kernel backtrace.

Naturally, an attempt to install Red Hat 9 returns much the same result: it thinks I don't have a hard drive at all.

I have an AWARD BIOS, v6.00PG. Any hints/ideas what to tweak in the BIOS setup to get me past this?

Have also given thought to buying an Ultra ATA/133 (UDMA 5) EIDE controller. Any thoughts, recommendations out there? Anything I should be on the lookout for with respect to mobo IRQ conflicts?

This has been a REALLY long day <sigh>. Any help appreciated.

Thanks,
--Jim--
 
Old 12-24-2005, 12:44 PM   #3
jtison
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Registered: Dec 2005
Location: Connecticut, USA
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Finally resolved

Self-posting, problem resolved.

You won't believe what it was. I still don't :-)

It was the bloody power supply.

About February 2005, I'd fried my last no-name Taiwanese power supply: I did all the power arithmetic, and settled on an Antec Truepower II 430W PS to replace it. Everything was fine. Well, at least until just before Thanksgiving.

The old nVidia MX400 graphics adapter almost literally burned up (it was not overclocked) in late October. I then replaced that with an ATI Radeon 9550, and the troubles started. Video was sporadic, and of course, the SCSI disks started posting I/O errors (unexpected bus frees, bad sector errors all over the map). These errors grew progressively more severe over the next few weeks.

So I started a long diagnostic path to try to resolve the problems, not thinking that the power supply could be the issue.

I even considered going IDE (which I did, in part) over SCSI.

I finally put a VOM to the 5VDC rail of the old power supply and found out I was only getting 4.42V. I wrote Antec, who said "well, don't put so much load on it". Duh. (Thanks for nothing, Antec. Some 3 year warranty you guys have ...)

I still wasn't sure. So I went out -- on a chance -- and plunked down $100 to pick up a retail 480W power supply. Once I installed the new one, everything worked.

Moral of the story: even if you don't suspect the power supply, check it. Replace it if you have to. It's cheaper than replacing all the failing peripherals.
 
Old 12-24-2005, 02:46 PM   #4
J.W.
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Excellent thread Jim and thanks for posting back with a followup comment about how you solved the problem.
 
Old 12-24-2005, 03:05 PM   #5
dmartins
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Distribution: Arch, Gentoo
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I don't think i ever would have thought to check the PSU.

Good thread.
 
  


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