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Today I installed a new main SSD on a ASUS UC32A which has by default a 500GB hard drive with a 24GB onboard Intel cache SSD, which already failed twice in the laptop's lifespan(OT)

Now the new SSD is up and running fine with Ubuntu 15.10 in the hope that boot times would be way less than on the old disk combo with Windows 7 on it (5 min!!).

Bad news:
The kernel tries to communicate to a ATA2 drive (which should be that broken onboard SSD cache not configurable in the BIOS) and wastes a minute doing that:

dmesg part in question:

[    3.159129] clocksource: Switched to clocksource tsc
[    6.734417] ata2: link is slow to respond, please be patient (ready=0)
[   11.381916] ata2: COMRESET failed (errno=-16)
[   16.749254] ata2: link is slow to respond, please be patient (ready=0)
[   21.396678] ata2: COMRESET failed (errno=-16)
[   26.764015] ata2: link is slow to respond, please be patient (ready=0)
[   56.440274] ata2: COMRESET failed (errno=-16)
[   56.442098] ata2: limiting SATA link speed to 3.0 Gbps
[   61.471730] ata2: COMRESET failed (errno=-16)
[   61.473536] ata2: reset failed, giving up

I then tried to find a solution here and apparently found the libata disable and norst kernel startup commands which should fix it:

Ask Ubuntu topic about ignoring ATA devices

I tried to modify the etc/default/grub file to ignore ata2:

GRUB_DEFAULT=0
GRUB_HIDDEN_TIMEOUT=0
GRUB_HIDDEN_TIMEOUT_QUIET=true
GRUB_TIMEOUT=10
GRUB_DISTRIBUTOR=`lsb_release -i -s 2> /dev/null || echo Debian`
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="libata.force=2:norst"
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX=""

and did a: 

sudo update-grub

I tried the following variations:

"GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="libata.force=2:disable"
"GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="libata.force=2.00:disable"
"GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="libata.force=2:rstonce"

and so on..

There was no effect whatsoever with any of these commands on the boot time and com error messages.

I double checked if I got the grub edit right - I removed the splash quiet default setting and that worked on the next bootup.

What am I doing wrong here? Does libata work and is it meant to prevent the waiting time on bad drives during startup? Any help would be very much appreciated so that the SSD and Ubuntu upgrade can finally give new live to the stylish ultrabook.

karel
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Snipy
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  • I have the exact same problem, the only difference that is my Asus is model UX32A.

    I have browsed the libata source code, and it looks like the string "FORCE:" should be logged to dmesg when it recognizes a libata.force option.

    This does not happen for libata.force=2:disable

     – Olle Hallin Feb 27 '16 at 17:06

1 Answers1

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An additional "no reset" would work:

libata.force=2:disable,2:norst

I've had the same problem with my broken DVD drive.

Guest
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