Comment 18 for bug 11461

On Tue, Jan 04, 2005 at 09:00:01PM +0100, Marc L. de Bruin wrote:
> Guido Guenther wrote:
>
> First of all, happy newyear!
Thanks, for you too!

> Regarding the problem: I fixed it.
>
> The short story is that it had nothing to do with smartmontools.
>
> The long story is that I tried a couple of things (5.33 from
> experimental, replacing DEVICESCAN with just /dev/hda to keep things
> simple, etc., etc., etc.) but none of these helped and did cause the
> original effect (near halt). I even tried to switch from kernel 2.4.27
> to kernel 2.6.8 but I couldn't even BOOT that kernel! All kind of
> ATA-errors and strange kernel-messages regarding irq's that fired but no
> service handler was registered to handle it.
>
> That got me thinking about my configuration, which seems to work
> perfectly with kernel 2.4.27 *without* smartmontools, but couldn't boot
> 2.6.8 and couldn't work *with* smartmontools.
I'm still puzzled. You can run 2.4.27 _without_ smartmontools but not
with smartmontools if you enable "enhanced mode", right? Even if you
_only_ select /dev/hda in /etc/smartd.conf?
Could you check if not starting smartd but running "smartctl -a /dev/hda"
shows the same symptoms?
Bruce, do you think that asking a device for smart data can cause
problems on a completely different bus? Sound very weird.

>
> I googled and read some pages, specifically
> http://www.linuxmafia.com/faq/Hardware/sata.html, which mentions that
> 'in case of ATA-trouble, switch the motherboard BIOS back to "legacy ATA
> mode"'.
>
> I don't have SATA-disks but I *do* have SATA-ports on the motherboard! I
> never touched the BIOS but after switching the ATA-support from
> "Enhanced mode" to "Compatibility mode", I now *can* run kernel 2.6.8
> without problems and *can* run smartmontools.
>
> So this might be something to add to README.Debian. :-)
Definitely. Lets try to sort some things out first.
Thanks a lot for your help Marc!
 -- Guido