[SeaBIOS] Issues with ASRock E350M1

[mbuschman at lucidmachines.com]

Very interesting.
The controller inside the disk is a Sandforce SF-1200.
The controller on the E350M1 is an AMD SB800.

Quoting Kevin O'Connor <kevin at koconnor.net>:

> On Fri, Jun 03, 2011 at 11:55:47PM -0500, mbuschman at lucidmachines.com wrote:
>> Thanks for the reply. I've spent the last week getting Coreboot
>> under my control with help from CareBear.
>> I'm running a patched Coreboot (latest, as of 6/3/11), and SeaBIOS
>> master (as of 6/3/11).
>>
>> Coreboot is presenting the drives as IDE.
>>
>> I've attached the logs of a successful and an unsuccessful boot, as
>> well as my SeaBIOS configuration - the debug level has been set to 8
>
> The key part of the log is:
>
> bad:
> |1efd0000| powerup iobase=1420 st=7f
> |1efd0000| powerup iobase=1420 st=7f
> |1efd0000| ata_detect ata0-0: sc=ff sn=ff dh=ff
>
> good:
> |1efd0000| powerup iobase=1420 st=50
> |1efd0000| powerup iobase=1420 st=50
> |1efd0000| ata_detect ata0-0: sc=55 sn=aa dh=a0
>
> The drive/controller is stating that the drive is not busy, but then
> the drive does not respond to register reads/writes.  Thus SeaBIOS
> concludes that there is no drive present.  Under normal circumstances,
> the drive will report busy until it is ready to respond to register
> accesses.
>
>> -- debug output from Coreboot has been disabled, as this increases
>> the overall boot time substantially.
>
> Can the failures be correlated to boot time?  For example, if you
> enable/disable debugging in coreboot+seabios, can you get it to
> reliably fail or succeed?
>
> Also, what time of controller chip is this on?
>
> Another test - if you boot from another medium, does Linux detect your
> drive even when SeaBIOS doesn't?
>
> I'm not sure what can be done to handle a drive/controller that states
> it is ready but is not.  I don't know how to distinguish that from a
> drive that isn't present.
>
> -Kevin