Re: [gentoo-user] Gentoo system suddenly failed to boot.

[gevisz <gevisz@gmail.com>]

ср, 17 февр. 2021 г. в 04:54, Edward <edwardmgibson01@gmail.com>:
>
> On 2/15/21 9:53 AM, gevisz wrote:
> > Yesterday, my relatively new install of Gentoo failed to boot with the
> > following repeated messages:
> >
> > ata5.04: SATA link down (SStatus 0 SControl 0)
> > ata5.04: hard resetting link
> > ata5.04: failed to resume link (SStatus 0 Scontrol 0)
> >
> > My first thought was that something is wrong with my old IDE (ATA)
> > drive. (The Gentoo system partition was on /dev/sda5.)
>
> What motherboard model is this?

It is a good question. My motherboard is Gigabyte Ultra Durable GA-MA790FXT-UD5P
and I had problems with it from the very beginning in the sense that it is
quite often doesn't see my SATA disks on the first boot (though, on the second
reboot it usually finds them). It is also quite often that it stops booting
the legacy operating system and automatically reboots before showing
a login screen.

I bought it somewhere in 2006 together with a Gigabyte S-series GA-MA69GM-S2H
motherboard, which I have been intensively using every day since then and never
had any problem.

In contrast, the Ultra Durable one has been used very rarely and for
quite short periods of time.
So, I do not expect it to wear off by now.

> Probably BIOS disk controller setting needs to be set to either SATA AHCI or something else?

Well, I will look into but the problem is that it worked previously
with the same BIOS settings.

Below is an account of what I have done so far.

First of all, I copied the system partition from my ATA to the SATA
drive, updated the system,
recompiled @system, openrc and gentoo-kernel, which unfortunately had
no effect on the booting problem.

At this stage, I started to seriously consider the suggestions above
that it may be a hardware problem.

So, I returned to the initial ATA system partition, updated the system
there, switched off swap (in fstab),
reinstalled grub on this disk and tried to boot from it. To my great
surprise it failed to boot again
complaining about links to two my SATA drives that it was not supposed
to use at all!

Of course, in this case, I have not reinstalled gentoo-kernel. So, may
be, the links to my SATA drives
are in the initramfs that still contains links to one of the other
SATA drive. (Its swap was there.)

However, I used another SATA drive to try the system from there.

And the legacy operating system has absolutely no problem starting
from the ATA drive now.