On Wed, 2007-02-14 at 13:56 +1300, Greg Trounson wrote: 
> At the risk of sounding like a "me too" post:
> 
> I also have an Asus P5W-DH, with the following drives connected:
> 
> SATA: ST3250820AS, connected to sata1
> PATA: HL-DT-ST GSA-H12N, ATAPI DVD Writer, Primary master
> 
> On bootup of 2.6.19 and 2.6.20, the kernel stalls for 1 minute when probing sata2, 
> eventually giving up and continuing the boot process.  There is no physical sata2 
> connector on the Motherboard, just solder lugs between sata1 and sata3.  From other users 
> I understand this is really a Silicon Image SIL4723 SATA to 2-Port SATA splitter.  It is 
> detected by the kernel as a disk, as below.

I've had the same problem, in addition to the JMicron problem, but I
have noticed a clear improvement in 2.6.21-rc5. (I have not tried any of
the versions between 2.6.20 and this.)


I also have an Asus P5W DH Deluxe board, I normally only have PATA
devices hooked up fow now (two harddrives on the ICH PATA port and a
DVD-RW drive on the JMicron PATA port).

I used to have the same two main problems as have been discussed in this
thread:

1) The one you mention above, the kernel stopping a long time to wait
for the ata2 port (ICH SATA port 2, which really is linked to this SiL
RAID chip), unless I had very specific settings in BIOS regarding the
disk configuration.

2) The JMicron PATA breaking the kernel in various more or less
spectacular ways.

So up until now I've had to disable the JMicron controller entirely, and
have the ICH controller configured in a specific way in to be able to
boot properly.

With 2.6.21-rc5 BOTH of the above seem to have had a clear improvement.
Both seem to work correctly with my configuration, I do however have to
pass the "irqpoll" option to the kernel on boot.

For the sake of investigation I did hook up an extra drive on the sata1
(ICH) port, and noticed that while the ata1 initialized quickly and
correctly, having any SATA drive connected caused the ata2 problem to
reappear.
However, the kernel recovered A LOT quicker than it used to and when
everything had booted, it seems that everything worked correctly (except
that really shouldn't have been a "sdb" drive detected).

Attached is dmesg output from both cases.


Regards,
Håkan Lindqvist

(I am not subscribed to the list, please CC me on any replies.)