SYBA PCI SATA Controller generating errors on startup

[mohnkern]

After plugging in a SYBA PCI ATA SATA Raid controller into a box with Ubuntu Feisty Fawn (Desktop) I receiving the following error after grub (on kernel startup)

28.407615 PCI: device 0000:00:0d0 has unknown header type 7f

The card is ignored. lspci doesn't show the card, and fdisk -l doesn't show the drive that's plugged into it.

[TJ (tj)]

Please report the output of:

$ sudo lspci -vvnnx -s 00:0d0

[mohnkern (mohnkern)]

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mohnkern@Casa-Scott:~$ sudo lspci -vvnnx -s 00:0d0
Password:
lspci: -s: Invalid slot number

I'm sure there's a parameter that's missing, unfortunately, I'm note familiar enough with lspci to determine what it is.

[TJ (tj)]

It is possible that the device quite literally isn't visible to Linux, but having looked at other similar issues (they're rather rare!) this was the most obvious first thing to try.

Let's broaden out the diagnosis now and see what is reported so I can get a feel for your scenario. If you can attach the output of the following two commands it would help:

$ sudo lspci -vvnn >lspci-vvnn.log
$ dmesg >dmesg.log

[mohnkern (mohnkern)]

I noted that the SB Live card is no longer being seen with an asoundconf command, I don't know whether they are related, but its worth noting.

Here's the dmesg.log file, other in a few minutes.

[mohnkern (mohnkern)]

lspci-vvnn.log attached

[TJ (tj)]

Something you might want to consider. In the reports I've read that show this error very often the issue turns out to be faulty hardware.

After looking at this page:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16815124020

and reading the comment in the sidebar that says:

"Pros: Works great and allows for transitioning to SATA if your motherboard doesn't support it.
Cons: None at this price. I wouldn't mind getting an extra SATA cable with the item.
Other Thoughts: I've been using this in Ubuntu Feisty with no problems. My MB doesn't support SATA but I'm still able to boot from an SATA drive. I did flash the card due to previous reviews I've read. I don't use the RAID."

I'd be tempted to consider the card itself as suspect and try it on another PC, or with another operating system, to try and confirm or disprove that before you get too drawn into trying to find a Linux issue.

[mohnkern (mohnkern)]

Thanks. I Think I've got another PC around here that I can test it on (I've long since blown windows away on this pc).

[mohnkern (mohnkern)]

Well, this gets points for being "strange."

1. Removed the Soundblaster Live Card

2. Moved the SATA controller to PCI Slot 0 (Or slot 3, the one furthest from the AGP Slot).

3. Restarted -- This time when the system started, it brought up the RAID option (which it hadn't before)

4. New SATA drive came up fine.

Thanks for all your help TJ. Sometimes, it's the physical infrastructure that drives one nuts.

Now if I can just figure out why it's giving me an error on a pvcreate.... But that'll go to the forums first.

[TJ (tj)]

Moving it makes sense. I've solved issues where the IRQ-sharing of the PCI slots caused issues. One such system had I think 5 PCI cards in and it took a week of shuffling the cards to get them all working correctly. In that case it was stuttering from the sound card when the Promise FastTrak controller was accessing disks and I spent hours playing with PCI latency settings until I finally saw the IRQ-sharing issue.

I did notice some comments that the controller needs its firmware upgrading in some circumstances:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=331190

[TJ (tj)]

Solution involves moving PCI adapter to another PCI slot.

[TJ (tj)]

I should have asked - can you post the fragments of dmesg that show the card being recognised, and the output of:

$ sudo lspci -vvnnx -s 00:xxx

where 'xxx' is the slot reported in the dmesg output.

This will help others in the future to find and solve similar issues.

[mohnkern (mohnkern)]

Add an additional note to this, when I turned on onboard audio, Ubuntu locked open during startup . I expect this is related to IRQ conflicts between items.

[Brian Murray (brian-murray)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. It would be great if you could test this with the latest development release of Ubuntu, Intrepid Ibex Alpha 5, using the Live CD. You can find out more about it at http://www.ubuntu.com/testing . Thanks in advance.

[Javier Jardón (jjardon)]

We are closing this bug report because it lacks the information we need to investigate the problem, as described in the previous comments. Please reopen it if you can give us the missing information, and don't hesitate to submit bug reports in the future. To reopen the bug report you can click on the current status, under the Status column, and change the Status back to "New". Thanks again!