Comment 78 for bug 138691

I have been having a similar problem to the ACPI part of this 'bug' for a while now and would like to state that the "halt: unable to iterate IDE devices: no such files or directory" message can also come from a failing HDD/mobo.

Recently I went pretty rough on my NTFS drive (on an ATA100 IDE drive) and ended up busting it pretty bad; mostly from hard power downs and not going into Vista to recheck enough. It was freezing up my whole system every time WindowsSearch got around to indexing the files in the bad sectors (or any other type of read/access in Windows/Linux). Eventually, Vista error check froze during index check (stage 2/5) and would never get to checking the files for errors. After using the drives boot-able CD-Rom utilities, I find out the drive has 17+ bad sectors and the internal recovery failed to reallocate them...on it's own (as it's supposed to do) and on several tries by the drive utility.

Anyways, during all this I started having weird power issues with my drives. I cannot restart the computer, or even restart after going into the BIOS... If I do, the HDD lights stays on full power and my Award BIOS hangs at "Detecting IDE devices:" and I must power down full for at least 5 seconds, then bring the power back up and all is fine.

So, with this full power down method, I have been able to use my Slave drive. I wiped my drives earlier in the process, so I am back with a fresh install of 8.04 with the newest -19 kernel. Pretty quickly, I started noticing my shutdowns not working and these halt errors. Since I do remember shutdowns working, and I upgraded to -19 kernel...it seems that may have been what broke my shutdowns. On the other hand, I installed all 239 updates basically simultaneously; so, that can't be said for certain.

Sleep/hibernate seem OK, but I'm not going to test them at this point. Progression during restart/shutdown:
1) Desktop shuts down.
2) Screen flickers.
3) I see the common network errors.
4) Screen flickers.
5) Shutdown splash screen shows up & the computer makes a sound like it is trying to shutdown practically simultaneously. If I check F8 terminal, the halt: error is seen; otherwise, the slash remains.
6) Nothing for about 10-15 seconds.
7) Some ata1.000 (?) error pops up with uMask(?) and other error details.
8) Ctrl-Alt-F# works, but I cannot log in to any terminal, and the ata1.000(?) errors keep coming every 10-15 seconds onto whichever terminal I am on.
9) This keeps up until I force the computer to power down.

Side note: I can't remove the "broken" drive to test this bug without it, as it is Master and my Slave is a Western Digital 30G that suffers from the click of death when it's alone/master.

I will make note of the drive errors, the ata1.000(?) things, next time I come across them, as I will not intentionally reproduce this.

-Derek