F8 libata errors -- hardware failure or bug?

Simon Andrews simon.andrews at bbsrc.ac.uk
Tue Nov 20 16:17:58 UTC 2007


Steve Bardsley wrote:
> Greetings:
> 
> I have F8 running on new hardware, and believe the hardware to be
> good.  However,
> I'm receiveing ATA errors very frequently.  This is pointing to my DVD
> drive, which is
> the only IDE device in my system; all others ar SATA.
> 
> I know very little about libata et. al. so I'm looking for any
> guidance on next troubleshooting steps.
> 
> Nov 20 10:05:19 scooter kernel: ata7.00: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x0

Oh boy is that familiar!  I just spent a week troubleshooting exactly 
the same error on one of our servers.  The bug report is here:

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=379771

The answer (or at least workround) was to append:

libata.pata_dma=1

..to the kenerl boot line.  The new ata lib seems to cause a lot of 
problems for a lot of people.

Hope this helps

Simon.




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