[SeaBIOS] Issues with ASRock E350M1

[mbuschman at lucidmachines.com]

Mystery solved - the drive's shipping firmware was causing this  
behavior - an upgrade to the latest firmware (2.0) resolves this.

Thanks!
-Marshall Buschman

Quoting mbuschman at lucidmachines.com:

> I should mention that a 16gb Kingston SSD I have works just fine, as  
> well as a 500gb traditional hard disk.
> Looks like this might be a problem with the disk itself. I know the  
> Sandforce controllers do all kinds of "smart" things like  
> compressing data to achieve greater throughput. I'll investigate and  
> see what I can find.
>
> Quoting Kevin O'Connor <kevin at koconnor.net>:
>
>> On Fri, Jun 03, 2011 at 11:55:47PM -0500, mbuschman at lucidmachines.com wrote:
>>> Thanks for the reply. I've spent the last week getting Coreboot
>>> under my control with help from CareBear.
>>> I'm running a patched Coreboot (latest, as of 6/3/11), and SeaBIOS
>>> master (as of 6/3/11).
>>>
>>> Coreboot is presenting the drives as IDE.
>>>
>>> I've attached the logs of a successful and an unsuccessful boot, as
>>> well as my SeaBIOS configuration - the debug level has been set to 8
>>
>> The key part of the log is:
>>
>> bad:
>> |1efd0000| powerup iobase=1420 st=7f
>> |1efd0000| powerup iobase=1420 st=7f
>> |1efd0000| ata_detect ata0-0: sc=ff sn=ff dh=ff
>>
>> good:
>> |1efd0000| powerup iobase=1420 st=50
>> |1efd0000| powerup iobase=1420 st=50
>> |1efd0000| ata_detect ata0-0: sc=55 sn=aa dh=a0
>>
>> The drive/controller is stating that the drive is not busy, but then
>> the drive does not respond to register reads/writes.  Thus SeaBIOS
>> concludes that there is no drive present.  Under normal circumstances,
>> the drive will report busy until it is ready to respond to register
>> accesses.
>>
>>> -- debug output from Coreboot has been disabled, as this increases
>>> the overall boot time substantially.
>>
>> Can the failures be correlated to boot time?  For example, if you
>> enable/disable debugging in coreboot+seabios, can you get it to
>> reliably fail or succeed?
>>
>> Also, what time of controller chip is this on?
>>
>> Another test - if you boot from another medium, does Linux detect your
>> drive even when SeaBIOS doesn't?
>>
>> I'm not sure what can be done to handle a drive/controller that states
>> it is ready but is not.  I don't know how to distinguish that from a
>> drive that isn't present.
>>
>> -Kevin
>
>
>
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