[plug] SATA boot problem

[Peter F Bradshaw]

Hi Jim;

On Wed, 17 Jun 2009, Jim Householder wrote:

> Hi
>
> I have just bought a 500GB SATA Seagate Barracuda drive, and have built
> a kernel on it with all the SATA options I could find built-in (not
> modules).
>
> When I boot from the drive it gets as far as trying to mount / and
> panics.  A list of partitions available does not show the SATA drive,
> event though the code that aborted was executed from it.

Are you sure that you are passing the correct root device to the kernel?
In general the boot device and root device need not be the same device,
although, in this case, this is what you need.

In the unlikely event that you do need a pause then you can make up an
initrd.img to give it to you. See your man mkinitramfs and your
initramfs-tools/scripts/local for details. (On my distribution this is
at /usr/share/initramfs-tools/scripts/local.)

>
> I read somewhere that the newest SATA II drives take too long to
> initialise and are thus not seen.  Since code from the drive is already
> being executed, that does not seem to be the problem.  If it is, a
> firmware update is supposed to fix it.
>
> Any clues?
>
> TIA
> Jim

-- 
Peter F Bradshaw: http://www.exadios.com (public keys avaliable there).
Personal site: http://personal.exadios.com
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