Hey All,

I've got an ASUS P5W DH Deluxe motherboard which has a "phantom" hard drive. I have asked ASUS about this & they say it's a know problem. During boot the kernel tries to initiate it which makes boot take a lot longer than it should.

Is there a way to force the kernel to ignore the drive at boot? in this case /dev/sda

Thanks

Can you put some log info from dmesg?
May be you can do kernel ignore it by passing some options to the module loader... I'm not sure at all if it's possible...

Take a look at:
/etc/initramfs-tools/conf.d/resume
/etc/udev/devfs.rules
/etc/udev/rules.d/udev.rules
/etc/udev/udev.rules

Before you try anything, flash the BIOS. The latest version may have a fix or an option to turn it off. (If the "drive" shows in bios it may be possible to "remove" it there too.)

Make sure the bad drive ain't in fstab or mtab and there are no rules about it.

The kernel line used to be: hdx=noprobe or hdx=none

Thanks Guys.

The problem is at the very start of the boot process, before any module loading.
dmesg doesn't show much 'cause it's as the kernel searches for & initiates any drives it finds, I can't find a log of this part of the boot process, if anyone knows, I'll post it.

The manufactures, ASUS, said they knew of this problem & claimed it was fixed in their latest BIOS update, which was over 6 months ago, so I tried flashing the BIOS but it did not work!! I've even tried the latest one at the time of writing this, but still no fix.
Definitely no rules in fstab or mtab, anywhere else for that matter.
Ain't in the BIOS either, hence a "phantom drive", which is why I want to tell the kernel to ignore it by passing an argument to it via the boot loader.
You say:
"Used To"?? Does this still work? 'Spose I'll just try it & see!

Have a look in your source tree - ../Documentation/kernel-parameters.txt

IDE only I thought; although if you are later than 2.6.19 I don't know how the changes to libata would affect things.