Hardy: Very long boot time. dmesg reveals ata* problems

[Thomas R. N. Jansson]

After a clean install of Ubuntu 8.04 on my machine the boot up process is stalling at certain point bootprocess making it very slow. I didn't experience the same problem in 7.10.

My computer consist of:
Asus P5W DH motherboard
Core 2 Duo E6600 @ 3.1 GHz
2 Gb ram.
Hitachi DeskStar T7K500 320 GB sata harddisk
LiteOn LH-18A1H - DVD drive
Club 3D X1950XT graphics card

When I look through dmesg I found what I belive is the problem namely
[ 38.395437] usb 5-7.3: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice
[ 65.943437] ata4.00: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x0 action 0x2 frozen

Which doesn't end before way later:
[ 206.659578] ata4: reset failed, giving up
[ 206.659587] ata4: EH complete
[ 206.659599] sd 3:0:0:0: [sdb] Result: hostbyte=DID_BAD_TARGET driverbyte=DRIVER_OK,SUGGEST_OK

I have tried to use the ata4=noprobe option but it didn't help and the boot time takes forever. I attached my bootchart.

[Thomas R. N. Jansson (tjansson)]

I have tried search on google and on launchpad but nothing seemed to concern 8.04. I now attached my full dmesg.

[Thomas R. N. Jansson (tjansson)]

I have now also tried to use the boot options "noapic acpi=off" but with no luck.

[Thomas R. N. Jansson (tjansson)]

Hmm I have found a workaround. This shouldn't be considered a fix. But after reading the post:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=4774235&postcount=4
it turned out that the problem could be resolved by changing the SATA Mode from IDE to RAID in BIOS. Now by system boots in 25 seconds.

[Thomas R. N. Jansson (tjansson)]

Hmm - it turned out to create more problems by setting SATA mode from IDE to RAID on a dual boot machine. Windows BSOD'ed 5 second it's boot sequence, so I am not using this hack anymore.

[Thomas R. N. Jansson (tjansson)]

Related bugs:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/153702
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/196076/

Related ubuntuforums posts:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=765195

[Thomas R. N. Jansson (tjansson)]

Finally I found a solution which is to use the boot options:
 all_generic_ide irqpoll floppy=off
in /boot/grub/menu.lst

[Dariel Dato-on (odd-rationale)]

Glad you found the hack! Will close this bug report. Please reopen if the problem reappears.

Thank you!

[Thomas R. N. Jansson (tjansson)]

Hmm - It wouldn't consider the problem solved. New users who doesn't surf launchpad will guess this by them self and will be stuck with a system that takes forever to boot? The problem wasn't present in 7.10, so it a bit of a regression and I think some time should be spent researching which change introduced the problem between 7.10 and 8.04.

[willz06jw (willz06jw)]

Please don't close this bug -- it affects Hardy and all other distros that use Hardy as their base ( like Mint). This problem doesn't appear in Gutsy and is killing every new user that encounters it.

Will

[willz06jw (willz06jw)]

Here is Dell's listing of this horrible error http://linux.dell.com/wiki/index.php/Ubuntu_7.04/Issues/USB-SATA_race_condition_causes_hang