[ale] Cloning laptop drive didn't work

Alex Carver agcarver+ale at acarver.net
Mon Apr 29 00:26:23 EDT 2024


This is in a laptop so there's only one IDE drive on the port, single 
drive jumper same as the existing HDD.

The very first error encountered with the SDD in place is ata1.00 
revalidation failed. This happens when the system is switching from 
initramfs to mounting the root filesystem so we haven't even gotten to 
anything more interesting yet where I can even start with loading things.

According to the boot logs it discovers that there's only a 40 wire 
connection so the system is limited to UDMA/33. The chipset according to 
lspci is a ULi Electronics M5229 rev 03.

I removed the drive at the moment so I'll put the SSD back in and try 
the boot flags.

On 2024-04-28 17:32, Solomon Peachy via Ale wrote:
> On Sun, Apr 28, 2024 at 11:11:01AM -0700, Alex Carver via Ale wrote:
>> When I boot using the adapter in the IDE bay I get a lot of ata1.00
>> revalidation failed messages plus many other ata errors. All I did was move
>> the drive out of the IDE bay and onto the USB cable and it worked.
>>
>> Now I'm completely lost why this worked.
> 
> The short version is that the USB adapter is hiding the messy details of
> ATA behind a USB Mass Storage API (and a much slower interface speed)
> whereas when it's directly attached something is not as compatible as it
> claims to be.
> 
> A few questions:
> 
>   0) What is the type of ATA controller / chipset?  Intel PIIX or
>      something else?  (Being PATA implies it's something relatively ancient..)
>   1) Do you know exactly what the first error is?
>   2) How soon do you see these errors; during early bootup or only after
>      the rootfs is remounted read/write and more interesting stuff starts
>      happening?  (ie does going into single-user mode make a difference?)
>   3) Is the adapter jumpered correctly for master/slave and plugged into
>      the appropriate place on an 80-pin cable?  (These SSDs transfer data
>      a _lot_ faster than any PATA drive ever dream of...)
> 
> I think it would be informative to tell Linux to dial back what it's
> trying to do.. Try adding 'libata.force=noncq libata.dma=0' to the
> kernel cmdline and see what happens?
> 
> (I've been trying to hunt down a sorta-similar problem -- An mSATA SSD
>   plugged into a PATA adapter... on an 6th-gen iPod.  Same setup works
>   fine on a 5th-gen, which is usually far more finicky..  Ah, the joys of
>   baremetal hackery and starting at the ATA specs until I go crosseyed...)
> 
>   - Solomon
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Ale mailing list
> Ale at ale.org
> https://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
> See JOBS, ANNOUNCE and SCHOOLS lists at
> http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo



More information about the Ale mailing list