install of Ibex a6 AMD64 on gigabyte ep45-ds3r fails during partitioning

[lawnsea]

I've tried installing Intrepid Ibex Alpha 6 AMD64 on my new computer, but it fails every time at the same point: 33% into the partitioning step. The relevant components for the PC:

Western Digital Caviar SE WD1600AAJS (sata)
Gigabyte EP45-DS3R
Q6600
8GB OCZ DDR2

I've tried the all-generic-ide boot flag with no effect, as well as both ahci and ide mode in the bios. Please advise what steps I can take to resolve this or help y'all troubleshoot it. I've attached two portions of the output from dmesg.

[Brian Murray (brian-murray)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. If possible could you please add the log reports as indicated at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DebuggingUbiquity/AttachingLogs ? Thanks in advance.

[lawnsea (lawnsea)]

Whoops. I didn't check the size of syslog before I uploaded it. It's huge. Here's a zipped copy. Let me know if there's anything else I can do to help.

[Brian Murray (brian-murray)]

This seems kernel related from the syslog:

Oct 2 02:08:55 partman: mke2fs 1.41.0 (10-Jul-2008)
Oct 2 02:09:52 kernel: [ 227.565519] ata1: failed to read log page 10h (errno=-5)
Oct 2 02:09:52 kernel: [ 227.565532] ata1.00: exception Emask 0x1 SAct 0x7fffa SErr 0x0 action 0x0
Oct 2 02:09:52 kernel: [ 227.565534] ata1.00: irq_stat 0x40000008
Oct 2 02:09:52 kernel: [ 227.565540] ata1.00: cmd 61/a8:08:df:06:44/00:00:02:00:00/40 tag 1 ncq 86016 out
Oct 2 02:09:52 kernel: [ 227.565541] res 40/00:94:d7:08:44/00:00:02:00:00/40 Emask 0x1 (device error)
Oct 2 02:09:52 kernel: [ 227.565544] ata1.00: status: { DRDY }
....
Oct 2 02:09:52 kernel: [ 227.566693] ata1.00: both IDENTIFYs aborted, assuming NODEV
Oct 2 02:09:52 kernel: [ 227.566700] ata1.00: revalidation failed (errno=-2)
Oct 2 02:09:52 kernel: [ 227.566708] ata1: hard resetting link
Oct 2 02:09:59 kernel: [ 234.096029] ata1: link is slow to respond, please be patient (ready=0)
Oct 2 02:10:02 kernel: [ 237.568019] ata1: softreset failed (device not ready)
Oct 2 02:10:02 kernel: [ 237.568030] ata1: SATA link up 3.0 Gbps (SStatus 123 SControl 300)
Oct 2 02:10:03 kernel: [ 238.315726] ata1.00: failed to read native max address (err_mask=0x1)
Oct 2 02:10:03 kernel: [ 238.315730] ata1.00: HPA support seems broken, skipping HPA handling

[lawnsea (lawnsea)]

Phoronix* reported that they installed Intrepid Alpha 4 on this board. Would it be helpful for me to try that? If so, where would I download a copy from?

The only sata problems I've found other people talking about related to this mobo and the ICH10R chipset had to do with detecting the drives at all, not talking to them.

*( http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=gigabyte_p45_mobos&num=5 )

[Brian Murray (brian-murray)]

Alpha 4 used the 2.6.26, while Alpha 6 has 2.6.27.

[Leann Ogasawara (leannogasawara)]

Hi lawnsea,

I saw in the first dmesg output there were some messages like:

[ 294.300033] ata1.00: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x7f8ff SErr 0x0 action 0x6 frozen
[ 294.300042] ata1.00: cmd 61/a8:00:df:06:4c/00:00:02:00:00/40 tag 0 ncq 86016 out
[ 294.300044] res 40/00:00:00:00:00/00:00:00:00:00/00 Emask 0x4 (timeout)
[ 294.300047] ata1.00: status: { DRDY }

That typically implies that your device is claiming everything is fine (ata1.00: status: { DRDY }) but somehow there was an issue with interrupt handing hence the timeout part.

Care to maybe try some of the following boot options to see if they may help (please try them separately):

noapic
pci=nomsi
acpi=off

However, Brian also posted an excerpt from you syslog which had:

"res 40/00:94:d7:08:44/00:00:02:00:00/40 Emask 0x1 (device error)"

This may indicate a hw issue. However, you mention you have a "new" computer so I'd be hesitant to say it's an actual hw error, but you never know.

Regardless, please let us know if any of above boot options help. Thanks.

[Leann Ogasawara (leannogasawara)]

Also just out of curiosity, are you able to run an Alpha6 LiveCD successfully?

[lawnsea (lawnsea)]

I'm downloading the livecd torrent to give it a try. noapic had no effect that I could see. I'm attaching the syslog and partman.

[lawnsea (lawnsea)]

The pci=msi flag had an effect, but not a good one. I got a a couple of the ata errors during the boot process on the screen where 'Kernel alive' is displayed. When it began to partition my drive, it threw several IO errors in retry, ignore, abort dialogs. Retrying had no effect. Ignoring led to the same behavior as initially reported: partitioning hangs at 33% and eventually terminates. Attached are the partman and syslog files.

[lawnsea (lawnsea)]

I just successfully installed on a Hitachi HDP725050GLA360.

I originally tried this on two identical WD1600AAJS drives with the same result and same symptoms across a variety of distros including Fedora 10B, Arch and Xubuntu. Others are reporting problems with this drive:

http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=11579

Thanks for y'all's help with this. I'm going to RMA the drive, but would be happy to run any additional tests y'all need before I do so.

[Rob (rob-fugina)]

Maybe related to 278159?

I have a similar/related issue, and my HD is a WD, but I don't think it's the drive, as I was able to partition the drive from the shell in another tty. The installer and/or partition editor fail to see the drive and/or partitions.

[owr084 (owr084)]

Any chance the problem could be the fact that the board you are using has an Intel chipset (P45) and an Intel processor (Q6600) along with a version of ubuntu compiled for an AMD 64 bit architecture?

[Rob (rob-fugina)]

On Tue, Oct 14, 2008 at 18:25, owr084 <email address hidden> wrote:
> Any chance the problem could be the fact that the board you are using
> has an Intel chipset (P45) and an Intel processor (Q6600) along with a
> version of ubuntu compiled for an AMD 64 bit architecture?

Not in my case, no. It's an Asus M3N78-VM board. I just thought the
problems might be related.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Per a decision made by the Ubuntu Kernel Team, bugs will longer be assigned to the ubuntu-kernel-team in Launchpad as part of the bug triage process. The ubuntu-kernel-team is being unassigned from this bug report. Refer to https://wiki.ubuntu.com/KernelTeamBugPolicies for more information. Thanks.

[Bryan Wu (cooloney)]

This bug report is being closed because we received no response to the previous inquiry for information. Please reopen if this is still an issue in the current Ubuntu release, Jaunty Jackalope 9.04 - http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/download. If the issue remains in Jaunty, please test the latest upstream kernel build - https://wiki.ubuntu.com/KernelMainlineBuilds . To reopen the bug, click on the current status under the Status column and change the status back to "New". Thanks.