Kernel error accessing ata drive

[Evan Huus]

Every now and then, following no particular pattern that I can discern, my installation of Hardy (up-to-date) fails to boot.

The usplash bar bounces back and forth until I force a restart.

If I hit Ctrl-Alt-F1, I get the following messages:

[86.772416] ATI1.00 revalidation failed (errno=-5)
[121.879145] ATI1.00 revalidation failed (errno=-5)

and then the following lines repeat forever (or as long as I've let them, which is several minutes).

[gradually incrementing number] ATI2.00 exception
[gradually incrementing number] ATI2.00 command
[gradually incrementing number] ATI2.00 status {DRDY}

This is on a brand new Dell Inspiron 530. It happens maybe one in twenty boots, and occurs before the normal lines about not finding a hibernate image.

Is this perhaps a BIOS issue, or is it more likely a kernel bug?

[Connor Imes (ckimes)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this. I had this problem with my 530 as well (though it happened on every boot) - it is not detecting the SATA drives correctly. I solved it by adding "acpi=off noapic" to the kernel boot options. Here is how you can do it from GRUB - http://grumpymole.blogspot.com/2007/05/ubuntu-how-to-edit-grub-boot-parameters.html

You will not want to do that all the time, so you can edit /boot/grub/menu.lst by adding those options to where it says "# defoptions=" and "# altoptions=". Save and close the file, then run "sudo update-grub".

I will reboot into Ubuntu and post some relevant hardware and software information so developers can start fixing this.

[Connor Imes (ckimes)]

I marked this bug as a duplicate of bug #153702 - another workaround is provided there, I cannot vouch for its effectiveness in Hardy since I already have my own workaround.

[apt-drink (apt-drink)]

Just before you close this bug when the USB / SATA race condition is fixed, remember that our computers should be using ICH9, not ATA_PIIX. That's our real problem...