Re: Kernel fails to detect internal hard drives after routine apt-get upgrade

Thank you Selim, Stan.

I will instal apt-listbugs. I clearly need it!

Unfortunately, I instead opted to install a backported kernel (3.13.x), which was able to see and mount my drives. But then, flgrx (ATI proprietary graphics driver) was not being loaded by/in the kernel. So I tried to remove it, and this broke the package, so that I'm now in dpkg hell.

I'm curious: is there a way to *only * install "security updates" in order to avoid other kinds of "fixes" that can cause problems like this?

Having said that, I hasten to add: thank you everyone and thank you Debian. Debian stable has been free of major issues like this for 4 years.

On Mon, May 12, 2014 at 8:55 PM, Stan Hoeppner <stan@hardwarefreak.com> wrote:

Dunno if you saw this or not. Selim identifies the source of the
problem below and possible fixes. Read on.

On 5/12/2014 5:52 PM, Selim T. Erdogan wrote:
> O, 12.05.2014:
>> Hi Stan et al.,
>>
>> Booting from the working kernel, I have dumped dmesg here:
>>
>> http://pastebin.com/MBTDfgc4
>>
>> I tried to save dmesg booting under the 3.2.0-4_amd64 kernel from within
>> initramfs, to no avail (I cannot mount usb drives to save the information,
>> and it does not see the network). However, when I added "debug" to the
>> kernel line in the boot command, I was at least able to see the system
>> messages while the errors were happening. Here is the relevant block of
>> text, and sas is involved:
>>
>> ata7: sas eh calling libata port error handler
>> sas: sas_ata_hard_reset: Unable to reset I T nexus?
>> sas: sas_ata_hard_reset: Found ATA device
>> sas: sas_ata_hard_reset: Unable to soft reset
>> sas: sas_ata_hard_reset: Found ATA device
>> ata7: reset failed (errno=-11) retrying in 10 secs
>>
>> Searching the web for "Unable to reset I T nexus" led me to this thread:
>>
>> http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/linux/kernel/1912604
>>
>> ... which was posted a short time ago and appears to be the identical
>> problem. However, I am struggling to understand what I should do in
>> response. It seems to be saying that my hardware and its drivers are too
>> "new" for Wheezy, even though this machine is 2 yrs old?? Does this mean
>> I have to upgrade to Jessie?
>
> I happened to notice the following bug report while updating last week:

>>>>> https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=746642

> Basically, it seems like people solved this by booting from a rescue
> disk and downgrading to an older kernel.
>
> After you fix your system, I recommend installing the apt-listbugs
> package. That's what showed me the bug report while updating.

The problem is a patch/commit added in 3.2.57-3 meant to fix one problem
but caused another more serious problem--unable to boot or register the
drives.

Since you can boot an older kernel, there is no need to use a rescue CD.
Simply boot the older kernel and manually install the latest 3.2.x
available prior to 3.2.57-3, using apt or aptitude.

$ aptitude search linux-image

will show your the kernel versions available in your configured
repositories.

Cheers,

Stan