CD-ROM not detected

[Daniel Borgmann]

When I tried to install to the S-ATA disk, the installer told me that it needs a
special driver for the CDROM and wouldn't continue. I tried this with two
different CDROMs, same problem and I wonder how it could boot and start the
installer from the CDROM, if it can't read from it. :) Something is fishy there.
Installing to my ATA drive (with S-ATA drive disconnected, I can't test with
both because I don't know how to make my BIOS recognize one S-ATA disk, one
P-ATA disk and a CDROM at the same time) worked without problems. The CDROM is
also connected via P-ATA.

Later I tried moving the data to a partition on my S-ATA drive and then boot it,
but it failed at the point where it tried to access /dev/console (it didn't look
like it could read from the S-ATA partition and couldn't find any mention of it
in the console text).
However one interesting thing is, that after I moved it to another P-ATA
partition, I forgot to change the fdisk entries. I rebooted and it works, with /
mounted on my S-ATA partition. So it does recognize the S-ATA disk and load the
correct drivers, but it seems that it does it too late, so it can't boot from it.

The Device Manager also recognizes my S-ATA drive and labels it as "SAMSUNG
SP1213C" (which is correct AFAICT).

This is the output of lspci:
0000:00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corp. 82875P Memory Controller Hub (rev 02)
0000:00:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corp. 82875P Processor to AGP Controller (rev 02)
0000:00:1d.0 USB Controller: Intel Corp. 82801EB/ER (ICH5/ICH5R) USB UHCI #1
(rev 02)
0000:00:1d.1 USB Controller: Intel Corp. 82801EB/ER (ICH5/ICH5R) USB UHCI #2
(rev 02)
0000:00:1d.2 USB Controller: Intel Corp. 82801EB/ER (ICH5/ICH5R) USB UHCI #3
(rev 02)
0000:00:1d.3 USB Controller: Intel Corp. 82801EB/ER (ICH5/ICH5R) USB UHCI #4
(rev 02)
0000:00:1d.7 USB Controller: Intel Corp. 82801EB/ER (ICH5/ICH5R) USB2 EHCI
Controller (rev 02)
0000:00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corp. 82801BA/CA/DB/EB/ER Hub interface to PCI
Bridge (rev c2)
0000:00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corp. 82801EB/ER (ICH5/ICH5R) LPC Bridge (rev 02)
0000:00:1f.2 IDE interface: Intel Corp. 82801EB (ICH5) Serial ATA 150 Storage
Controller (rev 02)
0000:00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corp. 82801EB/ER (ICH5/ICH5R) SMBus Controller (rev 02)
0000:01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation NV25 [GeForce4 Ti
4600] (rev a3)
0000:02:02.0 FireWire (IEEE 1394): Texas Instruments TSB43AB23 IEEE-1394a-2000
Controller (PHY/Link)
0000:02:04.0 Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL-8029(AS)
0000:02:06.0 Network controller: AVM Audiovisuelles MKTG & Computer System GmbH
A1 ISDN [Fritz] (rev 02)
0000:02:07.0 Multimedia audio controller: Creative Labs SB Live! EMU10k1 (rev 07)
0000:02:07.1 Input device controller: Creative Labs SB Live! MIDI/Game Port (rev 07)

This is the output of lspci -n:
0000:00:00.0 Class 0600: 8086:2578 (rev 02)
0000:00:01.0 Class 0604: 8086:2579 (rev 02)
0000:00:1d.0 Class 0c03: 8086:24d2 (rev 02)
0000:00:1d.1 Class 0c03: 8086:24d4 (rev 02)
0000:00:1d.2 Class 0c03: 8086:24d7 (rev 02)
0000:00:1d.3 Class 0c03: 8086:24de (rev 02)
0000:00:1d.7 Class 0c03: 8086:24dd (rev 02)
0000:00:1e.0 Class 0604: 8086:244e (rev c2)
0000:00:1f.0 Class 0601: 8086:24d0 (rev 02)
0000:00:1f.2 Class 0101: 8086:24d1 (rev 02)
0000:00:1f.3 Class 0c05: 8086:24d3 (rev 02)
0000:01:00.0 Class 0300: 10de:0250 (rev a3)
0000:02:02.0 Class 0c00: 104c:8024
0000:02:04.0 Class 0200: 10ec:8029
0000:02:06.0 Class 0280: 1244:0a00 (rev 02)
0000:02:07.0 Class 0401: 1102:0002 (rev 07)
0000:02:07.1 Class 0980: 1102:7002 (rev 07)

I'll attach the output of dmesg.

[Daniel Borgmann (spark-mailinglists)]

Created an attachment (id=98)
Output of dmesg

[Daniel Borgmann (spark-mailinglists)]

Ahem, I feel kinda stupid now because suddenly it also boots when I pass
root=/dev/sda5 (which is the S-ATA partition) to the kernel. Only the root
option of Grub still needs to point to the P-ATA disk, which doesn't look like
it's an Ubuntu problem. Could the problem be, that Ubuntu is installed on a
logical partition? I don't think I ever had problem with this though.

In any case, at least the CDROM detection problem at installation still remains
and is very critical (to me), please tell me if there is any additional useful
information I could gather after booting from the CDROM.

[Matt Zimmerman (mdz)]

Can you describe your configuration in detail, including which works and which
does not? What I think you are saying is:

- When you remove the SATA disk, boot from the CD and install to a PATA hard
disk, that works, however
- When you have the SATA disk installed and boot from CD, the CD-ROM drive is
not detected by the installer?

Is your CD-ROM is set up as a slave device on the IDE bus, and the PATA the
master on the same bus? Or are they separate?

Please send the dmesg output from the working case (the one you have attached is
the non-working case, correct?)

[Daniel Borgmann (spark-mailinglists)]

Created an attachment (id=200)
more dmesg outputs

Yes, that's correct. When the SATA controller is set to combined mode in the
BIOS (which obviously is necessary to boot from the CDROM), then the CDROM is
not detected by the installer. If I disable the SATA controller, then it's
working fine, but obviously I can't install to the SATA disk in this case.
The CDROM and PATA disk are not on the same IDE bus (this would be tricky with
my current cable setup). It made no difference wheither I had the CDROM on IDE
1 or IDE 2.
The dmesg output I attached earlier was the one from my working Ubuntu
installation, booting from the PATA disk but using the SATA disk as root
filesystem. Meanwhile I also managed to boot Ubuntu from the SATA disk as
described above, as long as the Grub root setting points to the PATA disk (if I
understand this correctly, this loads only the kernel from the PATA disk). This
is probably not an Ubuntu problem anymore and can be ignored for now.

Attached in the tgz (I hope it works, did not want to spam you with four
attachments) are the dmesg outputs of these configurations:
1. Ubuntu booting from my SATA disk with PATA disk attached, CDROM not attached
(I never managed to make my BIOS recognise my PATA disk, the CDROM and the SATA
disk at the same time)
2. Booting from the installation CD with SATA enabled and PATA disk not
attached
3. Booting from the installation CD with SATA disabled and PATA disk attached
4. Booting Fedora from my SATA disk with PATA disk not attached, CDROM attached
(for comparison)

It is interesting to note the difference between booting Ubuntu from the PATA
disk and booting from the SATA disk. In the former case, the IDE driver was
loaded first and created a device hdd for the PATA disk. In the latter case,
the SCSI subsystem was loaded first and a device sdb was created for the disk
(which works just as well).
This pattern is similar for the installation CD. When SATA is enabled, the SCSI
subsystem is loaded first, the CDROM is detected as scsi0, but obviously the
driver can't do anything with it. Later the ide driver does nothing because
"ports already in use". When SATA is disabled, the SCSI part does not happen
and the IDE driver can correctly detect the CDROM and create the device.
Now finally at the Fedora output, it can be seen that Fedora loads the IDE
driver first, the CDROM is correctly detected and loaded and the SCSI subsystem
is loaded after that, ignoring the CDROM drive.
From my ignorant point of view, this looks like the issue is simply that the
IDE driver should always be loaded before the SCSI subsystem.

[Matt Zimmerman (mdz)]

Herbert, do you have some input on this issue?

[Matt Zimmerman (mdz)]

This might be a duplicate of, or related to, bug #8196. Can you re-test with
the Hoary preview CD?

http://releases.ubuntu.com/hoary/

[Chuck Short (zulcss)]

No response from user, please re-open once you have more information. Besides
most of these problems I believe are resolved in breezy already.