Bug#636092: linux-image-2.6.32-5-amd64: Debian squeeze will not boot with drives on two Sil 3132 SATA cards

[Chuck Cox <chuck@chezcox.net>]

Hi Ben,

I added 'debug=vc' in my Grub config, did an update-grub, then shut the machine down and moved one drive to the second RC-211 card. When I try to boot it up again, I see "Welcome to GRUB!" then two blank lines and that's all. The cursor just sits there blinking in the first column of the second blank line. I left it sitting that way for nearly 30 minutes to see if it would time out and move on, but nothing more ever happened. It doesn't appear the kernel is even getting far enough to print any debug output.

On Sun, Jul 31, 2011 at 11:13 AM, Ben Hutchings <ben@decadent.org.uk> wrote:

On Sat, 2011-07-30 at 16:24 -0600, Chuck Cox wrote:
[...]
> Then I tried connecting up the four Seagate drives. The machine starts
> to boot and just freezes up right after "Welcome to GRUB!" I played
> around with several different combinations and found that the machine
> will boot successfully if there are drives connected only to the
> motherboard and/or one RC-211 card. Any scenario with drives connected
> to both RC-211 cards, I get the freeze right after "Welcome to GRUB!"
[...]

Please edit the kernel command line in GRUB, to remove 'quiet' and add
'debug=vc'.  This should show how far the boot process gets before
hanging.

Ben.