SRST failed

[Oceanwatcher]

I have an old deskside PC that I want to use with Kubuntu. I have a harddisk swapping system on it and have been using WindowsXP and Linux Mint on it so far, each with their own system disk, but with a common data disk. In other words, only two disks in the system at any given time.

I finally decided to install Kubuntu 9.04 as this is what we use as standard now in the house. The installation went just fine. Set one disk at system and swap, the other as home, using ext3 as filesystem.

The pc boots fine on the live cd, can access the network and also the server in the house.

It has 2 x AMD Athlon MP 1800+
512 MB RAM
Matrox Graphics MGA G550 AGP - dual head
Audio: On board C-media and a RME Hammerfall Digi9652
Separate network card

But when booting up on the newly installed system, I get errors that I have not seen before.

First of all, I am getting an error about an unrecognised pci device. I guess it is the RME card, but at the same time, a little bit strange as it is detected fine by the live cd.

But the showstopper is this error:

ata2: SRST failed (errno=-16)

It repeates this error a few times, then goes on with the boot. In the middle of the boot, it crashes out to CLI logged in as root and tells me fsck failed and that I need to do a manual fix.

If I press ctrl-alt-del it resumes boot, comes up with the login. But if I try to continue login, I get an error saying that / is not available.

This is something I have never seen before.

I used the live cd again to boot and check if I could access the harddisks. It gave me no errors, and the harddisks seem to be just fine.

BTW - I have used the same CD to install other system that are running fine. It was burned at 4x and checked for errors.

The motherboard is made by ASUS, has 4 RAM slots and 2 x 64 bits slots (extra length PCI). Have to use Windows to find the model number :-) Wonder why there is no really good hardware detector on a live CD. Would be a really sensible thing to put there.

[askrieger]

Re: SRST failed

A search at the Ubuntu Launchpad bug tracking site shows that this has been a problem possibly related to ASUS motherboards (or nVidia graphics chips) for all *buntu releases between Dapper and Intrepid. It may (or may not) have been resolved in Jaunty (9-04). If you are using this hardware,I suggest looking at the launchpad page to see if you can find anything useful. If you are using different hardware, I wish I had something more helpful to say.

[Oceanwatcher]

Re: SRST failed

Time to update this one.

After a lot more searching, I still was no wiser. So I started to take things out of the PC. Did not help to pull any of the PCI cards. And the AGP card was needed to get a picture.

Also tried changing from jumper set master/slave to cable select, but still no luck. Also tried swapping the cables to the other IDE connector. Then I tried unplugging the second harddisk. Now it did not give any SRST error, but boot failed because of no /home. At least one step further. Finally tried unplugging the DVD. This allowed me to boot. So how do I fix that? I moved the DVD to the second IDE connection and put both harddisks on the first IDE connection. That took care of that problem!

But the problems were not over yet.

I could not get online. I have three network cards here. Two are RealTek cards, one is a 3com. From earlier experience, I suspected only one card would work properly. But tried all. No luck. Tried changing PCI slot. No luck. Again, took out all other cards and only left this one in. No luck. Even tried adding a wireless card. Still no luck.

Then left the one I thought would work in the PC, swapped bootdisk to the Windows XP disk to check how things are there. It boots just fine, get on the internet without any problem.

There is one thing that I have a feeling is the root of this network problem. NetworkManager. I do not have a working DHCP on the network, and NetworkManager has been totally unable to accept a static address. I also tried setting up the network without NetworkManager and enter static settings, but no luck.

After checking that things were ok in Windows, I found a .deb package for wicd and decided to try to install it. I knew I might bump into dependency problems, but at least wanted to try.

To make it a bit easier, I then swapped to Kubuntu and removed NetworkManager, rebooted and just out of curiosity I checked the network. It worked! So far, I have not had any luck with NetworkManager on ANY pc I have set up Kubuntu on. And I see now that in KDE 4.3 you can have wicd as a backend. Nice.

Problems over? Nope!

Next project was to get USB working. This motherboard has onboard header for USB, but no onboard plugs. It comes on a PCI card, and that one was of course not working... trying another card gave same result. Trying other slots too... So back to Windows to check. Plugged in a couple of USB harddisks there and they connected just fine. Back to Kubuntu - and the harddisks show up!! So my medicine for a non-working Kubuntu now is to boot it in Windows XP. Seems to do the trick.

I have also added a RME Hammerfall audio card to the system and installed Jack. So far so good.

Only one problem remains, and it is not solveable by booting into Windows. The dual monitor setup is not working. Works fine in Windows and worked fine in Linux Mint (8.10 version), but not in Kubuntu 9.04/KDE 4.3 .

I will start a separate thread for this one. maybe someone can give me a pointer on what to look for there.