Esata drive does not connect.

English Hardware
1

I have just recently moved my desktop from openSUSE 13.1 to 13.2 (fresh install). I had made backups to a esata external drive which worked propery under 13.1.

Now when I plug in the drive and turn it on it is not recognized. The drive has a usb port and connecting using that port works properly. In addition, I have a laptop with a esata port running openSUSE 12.3. Connecting using the esata port works properly with the drive being recognized immediately.

dmesg provides the following output:

[108212.270885] ata8: exception Emask 0x10 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x4240000 action 0xe frozen
[108212.270893] ata8: irq_stat 0x80000040, connection status changed
[108212.270898] ata8: SError: { CommWake BadCRC DevExch }
[108212.270908] ata8: hard resetting link
[108221.231264] ata8: SATA link up 1.5 Gbps (SStatus 113 SControl 300)
[108221.270718] ata8.00: failed to IDENTIFY (INIT_DEV_PARAMS failed, err_mask=0x80)
[108226.234649] ata8: hard resetting link
[108226.694973] ata8: SATA link up 1.5 Gbps (SStatus 113 SControl 300)
[108226.695555] ata8.00: failed to IDENTIFY (INIT_DEV_PARAMS failed, err_mask=0x80)
[108226.695564] ata8: limiting SATA link speed to 1.5 Gbps
[108231.698353] ata8: hard resetting link
[108232.158670] ata8: SATA link up 1.5 Gbps (SStatus 113 SControl 310)
[108232.159217] ata8.00: failed to IDENTIFY (INIT_DEV_PARAMS failed, err_mask=0x80)
[108237.162049] ata8: hard resetting link
[108237.622363] ata8: SATA link up 1.5 Gbps (SStatus 113 SControl 310)
[108237.622378] ata8: EH complete

fdisk -l or Yast partitioner shows no new drive when the drive in question is connected.

So there has been no changes in the desktop hardware, and the drive worked properly with other versions of openSUSE on that hardware. I guess it is changes in openSUSE 13.2 (kernel, sata drivers???)

Does anyone have any thoughts or comments on this issue?

Thanks… Tom.

2

Hi all.

It seems that there was more to the problem than first described. I also found out that my USB 3.0 ports did not work.

In addition I was getting a string of error messages saying “AMD-VI event log IO_PAGE_FAULT device = 2:00.0 domain=…” on startup. I decided to find out about that error message, and asked Mr Google. There was quite a bit about that message. It appears there is a broken implimentation of the AMD-VI virtualization support on several motherboards. My board is a Gigabyte GA-990FXA-UD3. It has to do with the IOMMU setup.

In my case the fix was to add “iommu=soft” the the kernel command line and the problems disappeared. The USB 3.0 ports reappeared, and the esata ports started working. Amazing!

I edited /etc/default/grub and changed GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="" to read GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX=“iommu=soft”, ran “grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg” to change the grub boot file, and success!

As bonus, boot time was dramatically improved.

So we can call this one solved… Tom.