Re: Sudden wierd SATA problem on RELENG_7 (Re: ZFS hanging at kernel boot now, but didn't before... (Re: ZFS MFC heads up))

This appears to have gone away now. I unplugged the bay that was causing the trouble, and the system booted just fine on the remaining 4 drives. Then I plugged the bay back in (live) and did an atacontrol detach/attach on that bus (I wonder why I always have to do that). The drive was seen, and ZFS resilvered itself. I'm doing a ZFS scrub now to make sure that everything is good, and I'll do a reboot and see if it's all ok after that.

Strange, so it looks like a cable might have got a little loose or something. I wonder why that would have hung the kernel probe though.

Joe

on 22/05/2009 20:40 Joe Karthauser said the following:
Hi Alexander,

I've love it if you were able to provide some insight into this problem.

I'm going to try switching sata cables around next to see if the problem
goes away if I disconnect some combination of bays.

Thanks,
Joe

on 22/05/2009 19:39 Kip Macy said the following:
Motin is your best bet in tracking down ATA problems.

Cheers,
Kip


On Fri, May 22, 2009 at 10:40 AM, Joe Karthauser<joe@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Hi Kip,

I seriously don't understand what has happened. If I boot kernel.old
I still
get the same problem. Very confusing. :(.

Joe

on 21/05/2009 19:28 Kip Macy said the following:
I have no idea what is happening. I think our best bet is having
someone with insight into ATA provide us with help in adding
diagnostics.

Sorry for the trouble. Perhaps you can just roll back to 7.2 for now.

Cheers,
Kip


On Thu, May 21, 2009 at 10:50 AM, Joe Karthauser<joe@xxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
Hmm, I've had a bit of a miserable afternoon trying to fight my
RELENG_7
server, which now doesn't boot. :(.

So, it's a ZRAID2 pool with a ufs/gmirror root partition split over 5
disks
(gmirror on 500Mb partition on each of five disks, and zraid2 over the
rest
of each drive).

What I did was to update the userland, and then reboot. I didn't
upgrade
the
kernel (but I've subsequently done that and have the same problem).

What happens is that the kernel hangs booting just after displaying a
LABEL
message or ZFS pool/spool message. I _can_ get it to boot if I boot
single
user with acpi switched off. When I do that I can manually start
zfs, and
mount all the partitions. However, one of the disks is missing....
more
on
that next.

The machine is running a gigabyte motherboard (domestic gamer P35
board,
similar to this

http://www.gigabyte.com.tw/Products/Motherboard/Products_Overview.aspx?ProductID=2533,

although it might be a DS4 variant). I've got 5 of the 6 sata ports
wired
to a 5 unit SATA hot swap bay (5 drives vertially mounted into 3
5-1/4"
bays
kind of thing).

Now, because of the gmirror I can boot the system on any disk, or
combination of plugged in disks. I should be able to succeed with the
kernel probe up to the attempt to mount the root filesystem
irrespective
of
any zfs pool, etc. And, indeed, this has been working fine for
about two
years.

But, now it hangs in the same place no matter what disk I boot on
(I've
tried every bay).

But, without ACPI enabled it does appear to boot ok... what's going on
here?
Is it possible that the machine has developed a hardware fault?

Ok, finally, if I boot with ACPI disabled then one of the disks is
missing.
If I unplug it I get a disconnect message from the ata device, and a
reconnect and reinit attempt when I plug it back in, but no device
appears
on the bus. Usually I can do a 'atacontrol detach sata4; sleep 1;
atacontrol
attach sata4' and the device reappears. This happens on the other
buses,
but
not on the last one. It's not the disk, because if I swap it into
another
bay, it comes up and appears on the bus. On the other hand it doesn't
appear
to be that controller or slow in the drive bay because if I unplug all
the
over disks the system will boot that disk and get as far as the
hang....
hmm.

Is this a consequence of disabling the ACPI?

Does anyone have a clue what might be going on?

Joe

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