[SOLVED] Boot fails with "ata4: SRST failed (errno = -16)"

Question

I have desktop that has four disks. They have similar three partitions sitting on RAID.
/boot and swap are on RAID1
/ is on RAID5.
This worked well until a couple of weeks ago I noticed I couldn't connect to it via SSH. I went onsite and the desktop was humming but I couldn't get picture on the screen and alt + sysrq + REISUB did nothing. I shut it down by pressing power button and started it again. It gave me following errors:
ata4: SRST failed (errno = -16)
After a while there was
reset failed, give up
I restarted the machine and went to BIOS. There was only two of four disks visible. I shut the computer down, removed the power cord and then plugged it back in. This time BIOS showed all the disks there. I tried to boot up Arch and got the following.
Booting the kernel.
running early hook [udev]
running hook [udev]
Triggering uevents
mounting '/dev/md3' on real root # md3 is the RAID 5 device containing root
mount: you must specify the filesystem type
You are now being dropped into an emergency shell.
sh: can't access tty; job control turned off
After that I tried to chroot from USB installation disk. First I check the RAID devices and see that in md1 (/boot) all seems to be ok. In md2 (swap) half of the partitions are missing. I'm not sure how to interpret the last one.
cat /proc/mdstat
Personalities : [raid1]
md1: active raid1 sdd1[3] sdb1[1] sda1[0] sdc1[2]
1048564 block super 1.0 [4/4] [UUUU]
md2: active raid1 sdb2[1] sda2[0]
2096116 block super 1.2 [4/2] [UU__]
md3: inactive sdb3[1](S) sda3[0](S) sdd3[4](S) sdc3[2](S)
608169984 block super 1.2
unused devices: <none>
I remove those devices and try to recreate them. md1 says it starts with four drives. md2 starts with 2 driver out of 4. And then the last one.
mdadm --assemble /dev/md3 /dev/sd[a-d]3
mdadm: /dev/md3 assembled from 2 drives - not enough to start the array.
Has anyone any idea where did the two partitions go? I ran SMART-tests to all four drives in long mode and all of them passed the tests.
I use GPT partitioning table, UEFI and Syslinux if it matters.
Last edited by Tha-Fox (2013-02-23 01:35:05)

Answer 1

I just booted to chroot environment and checked that all the partitions show up all right. Below is output of one disk and all the four disks give similar info.
gdisk -l /dev/sdd
GPT fdisk (gdisk) version 0.8.6
Partition table scan:
MBR: protective
BSD: not present
APM: not present
GPT: present
Found valid GPT with protective MBR; using GPT.
Disk /dev/sdd: 312581808 sectors, 149.1 GiB
Logical sector size: 512 bytes
Disk identifier (GUID): 8B9EBB89-366E-4C81-8916-F61CB08273DB
Partition table holds up to 128 entries
First usable sector is 34, last usable sector is 312581774
Partitions wil be aligned on 2-sector boundaries
Total free space is 2203245 sectors (1.1 GiB)
Number Start (sector) End (sector) Size Code Name
1 34 2097185 1024.0 MiB FD00 Linux RAID
2 2097186 6291489 2.0 GiB FD00 Linux RAID
3 6291490 310378529 145.0 GiB FD00 Linux RAID