[ARMedslack] Booting Slack 13.1 from eSata on Guruplug Server Plus

[Jim Hawkins]

On Thu, 6 Jan 2011, Stuart Winter wrote:

> > I did have a look actually, but I think I've run into an 
> > initialisation issue. It works intermittently - if you run up a 
> > kernel, halt and then reset via JTAG, it will detect the drive, but 
> > fail when trying to access it. If you reset the plug after that 
> > happens the drive then becomes accessible to u-boot.
> 
> Is the symptom that when u-boot tries to find the drive, it stops with a 
> "T" and won't go further?

It reads the drive info the first time you try, but fails after that:

Marvell>> ide reset

Reset IDE: Bus 0: OK Bus 1: OK 
  Device 0: Model: SAMSUNG HD204UI  Firm: 1AQ10001 Ser#: xxxx
            Type: Hard Disk
            Supports 48-bit addressing
            Capacity: 1907729.0 MB = 1863.0 GB (-387938128 x 512)
Error (no IRQ) dev 0 blk 16: status 0xd0
IDE read: device 0 not ready
  Device 1: not available
Marvell>> ide reset

Reset IDE: Bus 0: ............................................................** Timeout **
not available  Bus 1: ............................................................** Timeout **
not available  
Marvell>> 

> I see this on one of my sheevaplugs and afaict it's because the drive 
> spun down.  This is why I have a "reset" at the end of the boot command 
> -- if the timeout happens, the plug reboots, the drive is still spinning 
> and the boot works.

Yeah, sounds like it's because the drive has spun down. It's fine if you 
reboot from Linux without halting, which I assume doesn't cause a drive 
spin down.

> This happens every time I complete a reinstallation of the plug (I 
> assume because the spin down delay is just short enough that by the time 
> the installer has shut itself down, and the system's rebooted, the drive 
> has spun down).

Well you could have mentioned that before, couldn't you ;)

Cheers,

Jim