Re: boot parameter libata.force=1.5Gbps not recognized
Selim T. Erdogan, 3.10.2012:
>
> 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.)
It turns out this wasn't limited to just the installer. It's a problem
with the libkmod2 package. Module parameters given in the kernel
command line are parsed incorrectly if the parameter value has a '.' in
it, like 1.5Gbps. I filed a bug report with a fix:
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=689872
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