[TriLUG] X Crashes, SCSI drive to blame???

[Ed Hill]

On Thu, 2002-01-24 at 08:16, Jeff Bollinger wrote:
> Hey, for the last few days, my system (RHAT 7.2, 2.4.9) has been 
> crashing when I load X.  The other day it crashed hard when trying to 
> write to a CD, and since then the system crashes everytime I boot X and 
> I have to push the power button to reboot the system (three finger 
> salute is useless, as is my other favorite salute, CTRL+ALT+BACKSPACE). 
>    I ssh'd into my machine (from a different host) and tailed 
> /var/log/messages and this is what I get when I startx:
> 

[snippage]

> pid 0, scsi0, channel 0, id 0, lun 0 Read (10) 00 00 00 00 10 00 00 01 00
> Jan 24 10:11:18 sec22 kernel: SCSI host 0 abort (pid 0) timed out - 
> resetting
> Jan 24 10:11:18 sec22 kernel: SCSI bus is being reset for host 0 channel 0.
> 
> After all that it hangs.  I think my CD-RW drive is actually IDE, but I 
> pass a kernel paramter to make the system think it's SCSI (I think it's 
> hdd ide=scsi).  Any idea what I can change to prevent the freeze?


Jeff,

I've seen *very* similar behavior with two IDE CDRW drives.  Basically,
what was happening was that the CDRW drive has a not-so-standards-
compliant ATAPI interface that had it (partially) responding to both of
the IDE channels on the IDE controller to which it was connected (it
should only respond to *one* channel).

The fix for me was to put the offending device on its own IDE
controller, set it to the master device, and then append the following
kernel parameters:

  hdc=ide-scsi hdd=none

so that the kernel will not try to touch the second (slave) device on
that controller.  See /usr/src/linux/Documentation/ide.txt for full
details.

And note that its not actually X thats causing your problem.  Its the
GNOME virtual-filesystem automounter thing that is periodically probing
the device to see if a disk has been inserted/removed.  You can also try
turn off the Gnome automounter and that will probably clear up the
problem.  But I think the kernel parameter appends are a better fix
since that way you can still run the automounter.

hth,
Ed



-- 
Edward H. Hill III, PhD
Post-Doctoral Researcher   |  Email:       ed at eh3.com, ehill at mines.edu
Division of ESE            |  URL:         http://www.eh3.com
Colorado School of Mines   |  Phone:       303-273-3483
Golden, CO  80401          |  Fax:         303-273-3311
Key fingerprint = 5BDE 4DA1 66BE 4F7B BC17  3A0C 932B 7266 1E76 F123
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 232 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
URL: <http://www.trilug.org/pipermail/trilug/attachments/20020124/325d76ad/attachment.pgp>