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#1 2016-12-31 12:15:15

JJJollyjim
Member
Registered: 2013-07-28
Posts: 21

Many drive-related problems at boot, system works fine after boot

Hello,

As of about a month ago, boots have been unreliable, with each boot having a 20% chance of success, and an 80% chance of getting stuck in one of dozens of completely different ways, either in the firmware while loading grub (with various cryptic errors), in grub itself (also with various errors including freezes with no error message), or right at the start of kernel output (usually with an "alloc magic failed", occasionally with an "error reading sector").

In the 20% case where the boot is successful, there will always be many kernel error messages from ata, of the form:

[    6.166671] ata1.00: exception Emask 0x10 SAct 0x7fffffff SErr 0x800000 action 0x6 frozen
[    6.168256] ata1.00: irq_stat 0x08000008, interface fatal error
[    6.169821] ata1: SError: { LinkSeq }
[    6.171381] ata1.00: failed command: READ FPDMA QUEUED
[    6.172840] ata1.00: cmd 60/08:00:98:dc:cd/00:00:31:00:00/40 tag 0 ncq dma 4096 in
                        res 40/00:40:e0:db:cd/00:00:31:00:00/40 Emask 0x10 (ATA bus error)

All signs (and googling) point to drive issues. But after boot, everything runs flawlessly:

  • Can dd the entire contents of the drive to /dev/null with no error messages and at very high speed

  • No more errors in dmesg or journal

  • No misbehaviour of programs

  • SMART results (to the extent I can interpret them) show nothing concerning

I have unplugged/replugged the SATA cable, but cannot replace the cable as it is a laptop and the other end of the cable is connected directly to the board. The drive is an SSD.

What is the system doing to make everything unreliable in the first ~5 seconds of startup, but reliable afterwards? And how can I improve the reliability of boots?

Any advice greatly appreciated.

dmesg of successful boot: http://lpaste.net/3201047556729602048
SMART results: http://lpaste.net/3748572306906021888

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