On Mon, Oct 31, 2011 at 11:45:59PM +0000, Wayne Stallwood wrote:
On 31/10/11 10:47, Chris Green wrote:
So I tried an xubuntu 10.04 installation and that works OK with no problems.
As I said originally (before I tried re-installing) the old 10.04 installation booted OK if I selected an older (2.6.32) kernel but failed to boot with the latest (2.6.35) kernel.
This suggests to me that something in the kernel has changed and has broken the drivers for the VIA VT2620 controller. However I can't find anything that seems directly relevent by Googling.
If anyone has any bright ideas or suggestions they would be very welcome.
As I think someone else suggested...Look in the BIOS and flick the SATA mode between legacy and AHCI mode...in legacy mode pretty much anything should be able to work with the controller but performance will be sub-optimal.
There's no such thing in the BIOS on the system in question. It's *very* early SATA, the system dates from around 2004 I think. The only SATA options in the BIOS are to turn the SATA on/off and to enable the SATA ROM. If you enable the SATA ROM then you get RAID things to set up but that's all (and it doesn't work anyway, i.e. all you can do is view it).
My betting is that given this worked before your CMOS was reset, this setting has defaulted into whatever mode it wasn't in before. It may be that later kernels expect that controller to be in AHCI mode.
I *think* the CMOS failure is a red herring, it still worked after replacing the CMOS battery with kernel 2.6.32 or older, it's just the later kernels that don't work.
NOTE: Some BIOS/chipset combinations need a cold hardware reset to go from legacy/AHCI so don't rely on the warm reboot when the BIOS saves and resets...save BIOS settings and powercycle the machine.
Finally ISTR you talking about loading optimised defaults which will include aggressive bus and memory timings...what happens if you load the "failsafe" defaults and then go back in and re-enable the SATA chipset ?
It's certainly worth trying the failsafe settings, I'll go and try it.