Comment 21 for bug 352197

I tried to set up Ubuntu Karmic Beta, but faced a similar problem with my Asus P5W DH Deluxe motherboard. AHCI is turned on in BIOS. I tried to load libata module with both ACPI on and off, as it is indicated in many forums, that the "status: { DRDY }" errors may be due to faulty ACPI-implementation in libata, but it didn't help. The console was still being spammed with these messages.

The motherboard has 4 (sort of) SATA ports on the South Bridge, one of which is hard-wired to a Silicon Image 4723 (EZ-RAID) fakeraid controller with 2 ports plus 2 SATA (1 eSATA + 1 normal SATA) ports on the JMicron JMB362/JMB363. I have 4x320GB HDDs on a RAID-5 mdadm-array + 1x1TB HDD for backup and long-term storage.

No matter what HDD I plug into the right port of EZ-RAID controller (turned "off" using jumpers, so that it acts as a pass-through/splitter), I start getting messages like this

[ xx.xxxxxx] ata2.00: exception Emask <...> frozen
<...>
[ xx.xxxxxx] ata2.00: status: { DRDY }
[ xx.xxxxxx] ata2: hard resetting link
[ xx.xxxxxx] ata2: SATA link up 3.0 Gbps (SStatus 123 SControl 300)
[ xx.xxxxxx] ata2.00: configured for UDMA/133
[ xx.xxxxxx] ata2: EH complete

every few minutes.

The problem is solved if I don't use the port provided by Sil 4723, then it just displays

[ 1.804020] ata2: SATA link up 3.0 Gbps (SStatus 123 SControl 300)
[ 1.804071] ata2.00: unsupported device, disabling
[ 1.804074] ata2.00: disabled

in the beginning, but that way I get to use only 4 SATA ports (3 from ICH7R + 1 from JMicron) instead of 5.

I tried both server and desktop install CDs, but the problem persists until I stop using the EZ-RAID port.