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Never say never

Years ago I had Gigabyte mainboard in computer at work. One day cpu fan died — it did not shut down but tried to operate with 85°C at CPU… That day I decided to not buy Gigabyte mainboards anymore (my home machine had in BIOS limit of working temperatures with 70°C set as temp to shut down).

Few days ago I upgraded my home machine. And it is Gigabyte powered :) To be exact: EP35C-DS3R is what I bought.

There are few annoyances:

• Intel AHCI SATA BIOS adds few seconds on each boot for checking 6 Serial-ATA ports
• Gigabyte AHCI SATA/ATA BIOS adds few more and ask for pressing key (with few seconds timeout)

But also nice stuff:

• profiles in BIOS — so I am able to configure everything and store settings for later use
• flashing BIOS from USB stick, hard drive or floppy (does someone still use floppies?)

I also added few other components: Core2Quad Q6600 CPU, 4GB RAM and new hard drive but that is other story.

Tags: bios computers serial ata 2 Comments »

Someone know how to re-enable Serial-ATA port?

On my system (2.6.23-rc9) I have Serial-ATA DVD/RW drive connected to sata_sil controller:

[   96.858283] ata6: SATA link up 1.5 Gbps (SStatus 113 SControl 310)
[   97.012480] ata6.00: ATAPI: TSSTcorpCD/DVDW SH-S183A, SB02, max UDMA/33
[   97.012482] ata6.00: applying bridge limits
[   97.169126] ata6.00: configured for UDMA/33

Sometimes when there is a problem with CD or DVD disk controller shutdowns drive:

[53560.095573] cdrom: sr0: mrw address space DMA selected
[53561.001946] ISO 9660 Extensions: Microsoft Joliet Level 3
[53561.002777] ISOFS: changing to secondary root
[53621.380238] ata6.00: exception Emask 0x10 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x90000 action 0x2
[53621.380249] ata6.00: cmd a0/00:00:00:00:20/00:00:00:00:00/a0 tag 0 cdb 0x0 data 0
[53621.380252]          res 51/60:03:00:00:00/00:00:00:00:00/a0 Emask 0x10 (ATA bus error)
[53621.380263] ata6: hard resetting port
[53623.783961] ata6: SATA link up 1.5 Gbps (SStatus 113 SControl 310)
[53642.595278] ata6.00: qc timeout (cmd 0xa1)
[53642.595285] ata6.00: failed to IDENTIFY (I/O error, err_mask=0x4)
[53642.595288] ata6.00: revalidation failed (errno=-5)
[53642.595292] ata6: failed to recover some devices, retrying in 5 secs
[53645.092046] ata6: hard resetting port
[53646.193870] ata6: SATA link down (SStatus 1 SControl 310)
[53646.193881] ata6.00: limiting speed to UDMA/25:PIO3
[53646.193884] ata6: failed to recover some devices, retrying in 5 secs
[53648.690501] ata6: hard resetting port
[53649.792323] ata6: SATA link down (SStatus 1 SControl 310)
[53649.792333] ata6.00: disabled
[53650.042442] ata6: EH pending after completion, repeating EH (cnt=4)
[53650.042459] ata6: EH complete
[53650.042512] sr 6:0:0:0: rejecting I/O to offline device
[53650.042518] sr 6:0:0:0: rejecting I/O to offline device
[53650.042522] sr 6:0:0:0: rejecting I/O to offline device
[53650.042536] sr 6:0:0:0: rejecting I/O to offline device
[53650.042632] ata6.00: detaching (SCSI 6:0:0:0)

I wonder is there a way to re-enable ata6.00 in other way then power down/power up whole machine because it looks like reboot is not a way to get it working again.

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17″ laptops are huge

Few days ago one of my friends asked me for help on choosing laptop. The idea was “I want to buy laptop to use instead of my 7 years old desktop”. We were discussing few options and he finally found Dell Inspiron 9400 for less then 1000 EUR. It is interesting machine:

• 17″ display with 1400×900 resolution
• Core 2 Duo cpu
• 2GB ram
• ATI X1400 gfx card
• 160GB Serial ATA disk

After checking who seller is we decided that I will go and buy that laptop (seller was from Poznań).

Yesterday I bought that beast and I have to say one thing — it is HUGE (bottom one on photo). I am used to my 12″ D400 (top one on photo) and sometimes I use Ania’s 15.4″ laptop (middle one) when I need MS Windows.

As usual it comes with MS Windows — this time it was Vista Home Premium. It was my first time with Vista — so now I can tell that I used all MS Windows versions (from 1.01 to Vista). What do I think of it? Hard to tell because I do not used it too much. Looks nice and takes some time to find things which were in XP.

Now when I used 17″ laptop I know that I do not want such one — 12-15.4″ are enough size for travelling. And for desktop I prefer desktop machine with big LCD then 17″ laptop.

Tags: dell free drivers laptop serial ata 1 Comment »

PATA -> Serial ATA time

Today I finished storage upgrade of my box. Before I had only PATA devices. Recently I bought Serial ATA II hard drive so my config was (2.6.21-rc3 kernel with libata for all SATA/PATA devices):

ata1.00: ATA-6: ST3120026A, 3.06, max UDMA/100
ata1.00: 234441648 sectors, multi 16: LBA48 
ata1.00: configured for UDMA/100
scsi 0:0:0:0: Direct-Access     ATA      ST3120026A       3.06 PQ: 0 ANSI: 5
SCSI device sda: 234441648 512-byte hdwr sectors (120034 MB)


scsi 1:0:0:0: CD-ROM            TOSHIBA  DVD-ROM SD-M1212 1R22 PQ: 0 ANSI: 5
sr0: scsi3-mmc drive: 32x/32x cd/rw xa/form2 cdda tray

scsi 1:0:1:0: CD-ROM            TEAC     CD-W516EB        1.0K PQ: 0 ANSI: 5
sr1: scsi3-mmc drive: 40x/40x writer cd/rw xa/form2 cdda tray

ata5.00: ATA-7: ST3320620NS, 3.AEG, max UDMA/133
ata5.00: 625142448 sectors, multi 16: LBA48 NCQ (depth 0/32)
ata5.00: configured for UDMA/100
scsi 5:0:0:0: Direct-Access     ATA      ST3320620NS      3.AE PQ: 0 ANSI: 5
SCSI device sdb: 625142448 512-byte hdwr sectors (320073 MB)

PATA bus contain: Seagate 120GB hdd which I bought in 2003, then 9 years old Toshiba DVD drive and 6 years old Teac CD writer. Then SATA Seagate 320GB hdd which I bought one week ago and configured as LVM (some parts of 120GB will be added into it).

Today I took out old PATA optical drives and replaced them with Samsung SH-S183A DVD writer (Serial ATA). Now bus look a bit different:

 ata1.00: ATA-6: ST3120026A, 3.06, max UDMA/100
 ata1.00: 234441648 sectors, multi 16: LBA48 
 ata1.00: configured for UDMA/100
 scsi 0:0:0:0: Direct-Access     ATA      ST3120026A       3.06 PQ: 0 ANSI: 5
 SCSI device sda: 234441648 512-byte hdwr sectors (120034 MB)


ata5.00: ATA-7: ST3320620NS, 3.AEG, max UDMA/133
 ata5.00: 625142448 sectors, multi 16: LBA48 NCQ (depth 0/32)
 ata5.00: configured for UDMA/100
 scsi 5:0:0:0: Direct-Access     ATA      ST3320620NS      3.AE PQ: 0 ANSI: 5
 SCSI device sdb: 625142448 512-byte hdwr sectors (320073 MB)

scsi 6:0:0:0: CD-ROM            TSSTcorp CD/DVDW SH-S183A SB02 PQ: 0 ANSI: 5
 sr0: scsi3-mmc drive: 94x/94x writer dvd-ram cd/rw xa/form2 cdda tray

That “94x writer” looks funny as this is 18xDVD writer. And I must say that due to switch to libata in Linux there are no problems with handling Serial ATA devices (nevermind hdd or atapi ones).

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