Comment 61 for bug 569680

Revision history for this message
Alkis Georgopoulos (alkisg) wrote :

I had similar dmesg errors with a very old sis-based motherboard, both in UDMA and in PIO modes.
These made the system unbootable with recent kernels.
But with an old knoppix CD the hard disk was working fine (tried with dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/null) with no dmesg errors or delays at all.
So I started trying old Ubuntu CDs and found that 7.10 didn't have the problem, while 8.10 did.

Then I read in http://patchwork.ozlabs.org/patch/113668/ about libata.force=mwdma2.
And now my system is working fine with that kernel parameter in all recent Ubuntu versions.

So it's possible that my problem was a bug in pata_sis, and I'm mentioning that kernel parameter in case others would benefit from it.