Debian loses harddisk on bootup 4 times and then boots. Why?

According to this Ubuntu forums thread (which may or may not apply, but since you're running Debian it's worth a shot), this can be fixed with these steps:

Follow the instructions in the last section of the first post, titled Info about libata.force=... :, to figure out your libata configuration.

libata.force= [LIBATA] Force configurations. The format is comma separated list of "[ID:]VAL" where ID is PORT[.DEVICE]. PORT and DEVICE are decimal numbers matching port, link or device. Basically, it matches the ATA ID string printed on console by libata. If the whole ID part is omitted, the last PORT and DEVICE values are used. If ID hasn't been specified yet, the configuration applies to all ports, links and devices.

If only DEVICE is omitted, the parameter applies to the port and all links and devices behind it. DEVICE number of 0 either selects the first device or the first fan-out link behind PMP device. It does not select the host link. DEVICE number of 15 selects the host link and device attached to it.

The VAL specifies the configuration to force. As long as there's no ambiguity shortcut notation is allowed. For example, both 1.5 and 1.5G would work for 1.5Gbps. The following configurations can be forced.

Cable type: 40c, 80c, short40c, unk, ign or sata. Any ID with matching PORT is used.

SATA link speed limit: 1.5Gbps or 3.0Gbps.

Transfer mode: pio[0-7], mwdma[0-4] and udma[0-7]. udma[/][16,25,33,44,66,100,133] notation is also allowed.

Once you've done that, add the line you found to grub.cfg. For example, if the above steps gave you libata.force=1:pio4, add

libata.force=1:pio4

to the kernel line in grub. You can test this by pressing e at the Grub menu and adding the line manually to the kernel line. If it works, edit the grub.cfg file:

sudo nano /etc/default/grub

and edit the contents of this line to add the appropriate command:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="libata.force=1:pio4 quiet splash"

Then run sudo update-grub.

I make no promises that this will work, since I don't have a system that's experiencing this error to test it on, but it looks like others have run into a similar problem, so maybe these steps will work for you.

John Bensin

Posted 2013-09-23T00:47:44.543

Reputation: 1 355

1That is propably a last resort option. Because: the hardware should definitely support DMA/100 mode and PIO4 only is terribly slow. – Dampf Hammer – 2013-09-23T01:04:28.340

Despite that, forcing PIO4 works. But well, I want uDMA – Dampf Hammer – 2013-09-23T02:05:23.730

Seriously, I am lost about that, crawled countless forums but nobody having really the same problem. The only one I could find with almost exact the same error posted two RUSSIAN LANGUAGE threads in the gentoo forum https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-947186-start-0.html and http://forum.oszone.net/post-2075655.html

– Dampf Hammer – 2013-09-23T00:51:08.747

I cant read russian, Google translator is so ultra unspecific at those threads that I cant make sense of it. – Dampf Hammer – 2013-09-23T00:52:45.880

Did you get a message that says "Gave up waiting for root device..."? The Ubuntu forums thread mentions that as a possible symptom of this error as well. – John Bensin – 2013-09-23T01:04:15.897

Nope it wont give up for root device. I have encrypted root, so it waits infinitely because of the password prompt. – Dampf Hammer – 2013-09-23T02:06:33.407

Debian loses harddisk on bootup 4 times and then boots. Why?

Answers