icycle
May 9th, 2013, 10:14 PM
Hi all,
First I'll give some background in this paragraph, then describe the current problem in the next paragraph. I recently started using Ubuntu 12.10 with a Crucial 256GB SSD disk (model M4-CT256M4SSD2) in my Lenovo W510 laptop. Things were good for a while and then one day the system completely hung. I'd awoken it from suspend in a meeting and used it a bit then it wedged up: no mouse pointer, cursor, response to keys, etc. I hard powered it down and from that point it would not boot. The BIOS showed an error "2100: HDD0 (Hard disk drive) initialization error (3)". I tried several soft and hard reboots to no avail. Later I tried one more time and it did successfully boot. I decided to check disk FW levels. I was running 040H FW and noticed the latest FW (070H) fixed an issue whereby the disk might not be detected by the host on power up. Great! So I booted into my old Windows 7 HDD and upgraded the FW in the SSD. Things were good for a bit and then I started having trouble booting again. Hmm, perhaps the BIOS is having issues, so I upgraded the BIOS to the latest (1.45) version. Not much difference.
That brings us to today: I had the BIOS SATA mode set to AHCI and was basically seeing constant SSD activity after the BIOS splash screen followed after a long while (~1 min) by "Read Error" which is output by the first stage of the GRUB bootloader. This repeated through soft and hard reboots, never able to boot. I booted into the Ubuntu 12.10 live DVD and verified that the disk was healthy (smartctl health report clean, SMART short and offline self tests pass, able to read all of the MBR and boot partition, grub CLI could see the files, etc). I installed and ran Ubuntu's Boot-Repair program (https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Boot-Repair). All of this still presented the same problem on boot.
I then tried switching the BIOS SATA mode to "Compatibility" so it'd emulate the old school PATA style disk emulation. The next boot attempt successfully reached GRUB menu! However, any attempts to boot OS menu entries failed (running memtest86 did work, however). The symptom there was constant SSD activity with no change to the console. Oddly, a subsequent boot (still in BIOS SATA compat mode) would not reach the GRUB menu. Re-entering BIOS menu and re-saving the compat mode seemed to help get back to GRUB menu, but it seems flaky.
So I have a full report from the Boot-Repair program (http://paste.ubuntu.com/5646096/ -- tried to include below but despite wrapping in CODE tags still ends up malformatted) and am seeking help from the greater Ubuntu community for help. What I think is that GRUB is relying on the BIOS disk access facilities and that is having trouble with this disk. I have tried the Boot-Repair option to have GRUB use "ATA disk support" option, no difference. I'm thinking of some way to force GRUB to use it's own disk access instead of BIOS, but I've not figured this out yet.
Any tips?
Thanks,
Brett
First I'll give some background in this paragraph, then describe the current problem in the next paragraph. I recently started using Ubuntu 12.10 with a Crucial 256GB SSD disk (model M4-CT256M4SSD2) in my Lenovo W510 laptop. Things were good for a while and then one day the system completely hung. I'd awoken it from suspend in a meeting and used it a bit then it wedged up: no mouse pointer, cursor, response to keys, etc. I hard powered it down and from that point it would not boot. The BIOS showed an error "2100: HDD0 (Hard disk drive) initialization error (3)". I tried several soft and hard reboots to no avail. Later I tried one more time and it did successfully boot. I decided to check disk FW levels. I was running 040H FW and noticed the latest FW (070H) fixed an issue whereby the disk might not be detected by the host on power up. Great! So I booted into my old Windows 7 HDD and upgraded the FW in the SSD. Things were good for a bit and then I started having trouble booting again. Hmm, perhaps the BIOS is having issues, so I upgraded the BIOS to the latest (1.45) version. Not much difference.
That brings us to today: I had the BIOS SATA mode set to AHCI and was basically seeing constant SSD activity after the BIOS splash screen followed after a long while (~1 min) by "Read Error" which is output by the first stage of the GRUB bootloader. This repeated through soft and hard reboots, never able to boot. I booted into the Ubuntu 12.10 live DVD and verified that the disk was healthy (smartctl health report clean, SMART short and offline self tests pass, able to read all of the MBR and boot partition, grub CLI could see the files, etc). I installed and ran Ubuntu's Boot-Repair program (https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Boot-Repair). All of this still presented the same problem on boot.
I then tried switching the BIOS SATA mode to "Compatibility" so it'd emulate the old school PATA style disk emulation. The next boot attempt successfully reached GRUB menu! However, any attempts to boot OS menu entries failed (running memtest86 did work, however). The symptom there was constant SSD activity with no change to the console. Oddly, a subsequent boot (still in BIOS SATA compat mode) would not reach the GRUB menu. Re-entering BIOS menu and re-saving the compat mode seemed to help get back to GRUB menu, but it seems flaky.
So I have a full report from the Boot-Repair program (http://paste.ubuntu.com/5646096/ -- tried to include below but despite wrapping in CODE tags still ends up malformatted) and am seeking help from the greater Ubuntu community for help. What I think is that GRUB is relying on the BIOS disk access facilities and that is having trouble with this disk. I have tried the Boot-Repair option to have GRUB use "ATA disk support" option, no difference. I'm thinking of some way to force GRUB to use it's own disk access instead of BIOS, but I've not figured this out yet.
Any tips?
Thanks,
Brett