SATA errors and freeze - 2.6.8.1

SATA errors and freeze - 2.6.8.1

[morten]

Hi,

[Note: Please CC to morten@team60.dk, as I'm not substribed.]


I have a 120GB Seagate SATA HDD on a nForce2 motherboard with the siI 3512A
SATA controller. I use the sata_sil driver. Please ask for more specs, if
you need them. :)

A few days ago I installed Debian Sarge 3.1RC1 with the new Debian installer.
FYI it has a 2.4.26 kernel. I proceeded to download the new 2.6.8.1 kernel
from kernel.org, configuring and compiling it. Everything seemed to go
smooth.
Then I wanted to install modconf and ran apt-get install modconf. It fetched
the package from the Internet as it was supposed to, but when it was about
to unpack the package, linux froze and I got an error similar to the one
below.

ata1: command 0x35 timeout, stat 0x58 host_stat 0x1
scsi: ERROR on channel 0, id 0, lun 0, CDB: 0x2a 00 0d 95 b9 9c 00 04 00 00
current sda: sense = 70  3
ASC= c ASCQ= 2
Raw sense data:0x70 0x00 0x03 0x00 0x00 0x00 0x00 0x06 0x00 0x00 0x00 0x00
0x0c 0x02
end_request: I/O error, dev sda, sector 227916204
ATA: abnormal status 0x58 on port 0xE181B087
ATA: abnormal status 0x58 on port 0xE181B087
ATA: abnormal status 0x58 on port 0xE181B087

I rebooted, repeated - same result.
I also tried the precompiled binaries of 2.6.7 from the Debian archives,
but that too yielded the same result.
I also tried that it froze during boot a few times, when initializing all
the daemons.

In between I used the 2.4.26 kernel that came with Sarge, and it worked
perfectly fine. I also have Windows 2000 on dual boot, and there's no
problems there either, so I don't think it's a hardware problem.

I heard that there has been a lot of work on SATA in 2.6.7 and 2.6.8, so
could this be a bug?

Thanks in advance,

Morten Bojsen-Hansen
morten@team60.dk