Probing EDD message at boot time: what does it mean?
 

Hi all!

For the first time after 3 and half years of honorable career of my Sony VAIO VGN-FE21M with triple boot, I've seen this message at boot:
then the boot hang up for a few minutes with a flashing cursor immediately after the message and finally it booted the default OpenSuse 11.1 in the usual way.

I tried to search LQ, Wikipedia, Google... but even if the message has been reported by many people, nobody gave the answer to the question running in my mind:
Should I start to think about the funeral for my beloved notebook? Should I consider to do an additional backup copy of the backup of my disk, just for sure? Thank you.

hi

edd= Enhanced Disk Drive

your kernel would need to have the firmware downloaded suitable for your system...your kernel config would need edd to be on (edd=y or m but mine is off or not set)

I could not find your hardware and edd in one link in my fast search so here is another pc to give you a sniff.

http://linux.dell.com/edd/good.html

2) that you have used your computer without complaining you need the firmware suggests you do not need it...sorry its your choice but I like to be blunt sometimes


assuming you are using grub-legacy add edd=off to end of your kernel line ...if opensuse has a kopt line you could add it there....

Thank you for your valuable information. The acronym expansion let me find this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enhanced_Disk_Drive which explains a lot of things. Now I realize that the problem is not the probing of EDD, since if I understand well, it is activated on my system and every time it boots up the probe is done. Maybe the message is among the terminal output which usually I don't see because it disappears too fast. The problem was that for the first time it hung up for a while, due to who-ever-know reason. Thank you, aus9! :)