[ale] Cloning laptop drive didn't work

[Solomon Peachy]

On Sun, Apr 28, 2024 at 11:11:01AM -0700, Alex Carver via Ale wrote:
> When I boot using the adapter in the IDE bay I get a lot of ata1.00
> revalidation failed messages plus many other ata errors. All I did was move
> the drive out of the IDE bay and onto the USB cable and it worked.
> 
> Now I'm completely lost why this worked.

The short version is that the USB adapter is hiding the messy details of 
ATA behind a USB Mass Storage API (and a much slower interface speed) 
whereas when it's directly attached something is not as compatible as it 
claims to be.

A few questions:

 0) What is the type of ATA controller / chipset?  Intel PIIX or 
    something else?  (Being PATA implies it's something relatively ancient..)
 1) Do you know exactly what the first error is?
 2) How soon do you see these errors; during early bootup or only after 
    the rootfs is remounted read/write and more interesting stuff starts 
    happening?  (ie does going into single-user mode make a difference?)
 3) Is the adapter jumpered correctly for master/slave and plugged into 
    the appropriate place on an 80-pin cable?  (These SSDs transfer data 
    a _lot_ faster than any PATA drive ever dream of...)

I think it would be informative to tell Linux to dial back what it's 
trying to do.. Try adding 'libata.force=noncq libata.dma=0' to the 
kernel cmdline and see what happens?

(I've been trying to hunt down a sorta-similar problem -- An mSATA SSD 
 plugged into a PATA adapter... on an 6th-gen iPod.  Same setup works 
 fine on a 5th-gen, which is usually far more finicky..  Ah, the joys of 
 baremetal hackery and starting at the ATA specs until I go crosseyed...)

 - Solomon
-- 
Solomon Peachy			      pizza at shaftnet dot org (email&xmpp)
                                      @pizza:shaftnet dot org   (matrix)
Dowling Park, FL                      speachy (libera.chat)
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