[coreboot] [solved] i945: AHCI timeout with Crucial m4 SSD 2.5 in SeaBIOS on cold boot

[Paul Menzel]

TLDR; Upgrading the drive firmware to 070H solved the issue.


Am Samstag, den 20.09.2014, 02:12 +0200 schrieb Peter Stuge:
> Paul Menzel wrote:
> > Changelog for 070H:
> ..
> >       * Resolved a power-up timing issue that could result in a drive
> >         hang, resulting in an inability to communicate with the host
> >         computer.
> ..
> > That last item might even be a fix for the issue we experience,
> > so I am curious if you have tried it.
> 
> Do I understand correctly that you have a firmware newer than this,
> and you can reliably reproduce the problem?
> 
> Or if your firmware is older, why don't you try to upgrade and tell
> us the results?

Upgrading the firmware is cumbersome as at least for Crucial drives no
GNU/Linux user space tools are provided and burning a CD for 5 MB seems
to be waste.

In the end I succeeded upgrading the drive by booting from a live system
on desktop PC with a proprietary BIOS, as the USB device was not
detected on the Lenovo X60 with coreboot and SeaBIOS, and loaded the
extracted files from the ISO image

    $ sudo modprobe loop
    $ sudo mount /tmp/crucial-firmware-update.iso /mnt -o loop
    $ # copy files to /boot

with GRUB. In the command line mode, I entered the following.

    kernel16 /memdisk floppy raw
    initrd16 /boot2880.img
    boot

The upgrade from 0309 to 070H was successful and trying the drive in the
Lenovo X60t it was detected by SeaBIOS even at cold boot.

> Since you are buying hardware components for Windows machines but not
> using them as they were designed (with Windows) you will have issues
> that manufacturers do not care about.

That is correct, but in this case even if there had been MS Windows
installed on the SSD, it would not have been detected. ;-)


Thanks,

Paul
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