boot stalls for 30+ sec: ata device not ready? [SOLVED]

[CoryV]

Hi all,
My issue has got to with booting, but isn't necessarily related to LM. So I'm not all sure if this is the correct corner for the content - but here goes:

The setup:
Athlon X2 4850 on an MS-7501 mainboard, 6 GB RAM, currently 3 sata hd's, 1 sata DVD-RW and 1 ata CD-R; no (permanently) USB-connected storage.

The issue:
When booting, after the first few seconds of HD activity my computer seems to stall for a varying number of seconds
Both on LMDE x64 and WinXP, although the latter is not very consistent in boot time and a lot harder to trace as to what is happening when.

The details:
dmesg show something in the line of:

Code: Select all

00.85000 ... ata device init
35.50000 ata2.0: device not ready
...
38.00000 ata2.0: device type details

...
(ata2.0 is a Samsung DVD-RW on the sata bus)

Mhhh, I should have taken a copy of the relevant lines, but I think that's not immediately necessary for my question: you see the jump from 0.5... to 35.5...

Anyone ideas why this happens and what I can do about it - apart from removing this particular device from the sata bus?

Thanks for sharing your thoughts!

[xenopeek]

Moved to LMDE forum. For the Ubuntu based Linux Mint you can investigate your boot process in more detail by installing bootchart, which profiles your boot and creates a chart of what all is happening from second to second during boot. From past experience, installing bootchart on LMDE will not automatically also start it during boot--I'm not sure how to do that. Perhaps somebody else running LMDE will be familiar with it. Sometimes having a chart of the boot steps can be helpful in figuring out what is going on.

[CoryV]

Further investigating, I came across several threads on a number of distro-oriented fora. There's bug reports dating back to 2009 that seem to point to issues with BIOS on SB700 chipset (which my MS-7501 mobo is based on) and sata/ide drives in use, and maybe even the boot order.
Looks like I need to live with it - for a while at least, as long as performance isn't effected I'll leave it as it is.
Live with it, 30+ seconds at each boot for contemplating my bads...

(edit: URL inserted, wording slightly changed)

[CoryV]

Well then, I got it sorted - sort of. Not solved, yet.

With the case still open, I figured I might as well try to pull the power and s-ata cables from the slow-to-init drive and see how boot performed without.
Result: a perfect, quick boot! From power-up to login window in about 35 seconds, roughly counted. Not bad, I'd say...

Anybody tips on what s-ata DVD-RW is better supported than the Samsung drive I have now? It is reported as a TSSTcorp CDDVDW SH-S223C running firmware SB07.


No changes to boot order in BIOS were made in this attempt. The BIOS does some kind of auto-detect for the list of devices to boot from, and adds devices in a seemingly random order. I reckoned it would remove devices from the list in a similar fashion, which apparently is correct.
(I may have to clarify this a bit: the BIOS has a list of 5 boot devices, but even when I set only the first entry to the hard drive I want to boot from, and the other entries to "Disabled", next time I enter the BIOS the 2nd and consecutive entries are filled with the other devices; with 2 optical and 3 magnetic drives, there's ample choice... Oh, I realize I may have to set "Boot from other devices" to "No" to keep the list clean - this doesn't let me attach USB drives anyway, as I have to first attach and then manually select a USB drive as the first boot device. No option to "boot from any USB drive"...)

[CoryV]

Definitely the Samsung DVD-RW is not properly responding during boot. Had it connected on-and-off for a series of boots, and consistently showed the delay.
Once booted, it works well though. Weird.

Although... my 640 GB sata Samsung HD640JJ hard drive has a few bad sectors, and is slowing to around 1.5 Mbps (HDTune 2.55 under XP32). I tell ya, that's sloooowwww to run XP from

Once I disconnected this drive, the system is back to normal speed under LMDE/64.

But there's more weird things going on: the on-board network card is intermittently loosing connection. Put an old but apparently still reliable 3Com 3c590 in there: network up.
Mhhhh... I'm afraid I need a new mobo/processor

Anyone of the readers got tips for a low-power combo?
I prefer green, but It should be capable of running Linux as host for 2-3 virtual machines concurrently: one vm would be LMDE, the others would run WinXP or Win7.