On Thu, Oct 07, 2004 at 12:39:54AM -0400, Jeff Garzik wrote:
Alas, this does not eliminate the 30-second delay on my box.
OK, thanks for trying. So it's not the READ SECTORS call itself
that's the problem.
Just to re-emphasize, I feel a particularly relevant detail is that my VIA-based Athlon64 box has _all_ PATA ports disabled.
I am fairly certainly that the delay did not exist when I enabled at least one PATA port, and I can verify this if you would like.
Yeah, that'd be good to know. The PATA controller doesn't show up in
your lspci results from 5 July, so I'm sure you had it turned off then too.
BIOS reports having 4 disks in your system. Does that match
what you would expect?
Your boot disk is on this Promise controller, yes?
00:0d.0 RAID bus controller: Promise Technology, Inc. PDC20378
(SATA150 TX) (rev 02)
The second disk is on a different controller though, with its own EDD
3.0-compliant BIOS.
00:0f.0 RAID bus controller: VIA Technologies,
Inc. VIA VT6420 SATA
RAID Controller (rev 80)
Subsystem: Micro-Star International Co., Ltd. MSI Neo K8T
FIS2R mainboard
Then BIOS says you've got two more disks.
Both disks 82 and 83 look remarkably small (20808 sectors each,
~10MB). And I would bet there's no media present, as there's no
mbr_signature field given... So BIOS says there's a disk there, but
there really isn't. Which could cause the kind of timeout you're
seeing. To what are these attached? It's the BIOS for this
controller that's probably what's lying.