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boot parameter libata.force=1.5Gbps not recognized



Hi,

Adding "libata.force=1.5Gbps" to the boot parameters for the installer 
doesn't work.  It leads to a message saying "unknown parameter 5Gbps".
(Trying 3.0Gbps leads to "unknown parameter 0Gbps" so it looks like it 
could be a parsing issue.)

Details:
I have a Sony Vaio VGN-NS140E laptop that was working fine with sid 
until its hard drive died recently, so I got an SSD and prepared a usb 
stick with the wheezy beta2 installer.  The install was okay generally, 
though there were many serious errors when accessing the drive, making 
the system unusable.  Searching online, I found out that some computers,
even ones whose SATA controllers are supposedly capable of 3Gbps, can 
only manage 1.5Gbps and have problems with the auto-negotiation to drop 
from 3Gbps to 1.5Gbps.  The old hard drive that came out of the laptop 
had a jumper on it, limiting its speed to 1.5Gbps, but this new SSD 
doesn't have such a jumper setting, as far as I could find out.  

To test that dropping to 1.5Gbps would solve the problems, I tried 
installing Linux Mint.  It recognized the boot parameter correctly, 
leading to no drive errors at all and good performance (within the 
bounds of 1.5Gbps, or course --- still much faster than my old hard 
drive).  The kernel for Mint was 3.2.0-23 and the one in the Debian 
installer was 3.2.0-3, I think.  (By the way, without that parameter, 
Mint also had massive problems with the new drive.)

Selim


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