Terrifying 2 hours - SSD died and came to life again

Question

That's what I've just had. In a bid to troubleshoot pulseaudio crashing issues, I decided to re-enable on-board sound and remove the X-Fi card (I've read plenty of stories regarding the ca0106 driver, and since it's not been updated since 2006 I figured it could be that). To re-enable on board (hda-audio) meant I had to rebuild my kernel first (I build a minimal kernel, and hda-audio wasn't necessary the way my system was configured). So kernel built and installed, rebooted and got the on-board sound working with pulse and 5:1 audio. All satisfactory so time to remove the X-Fi card.
At this point, things went pear shaped. Took the card out, powered up, and stuck at post detecting drives. More worryingly, it was the SSD that was causing the detection fault.
Disconnected all other drives (3 platters and DVD) and tried again. same problem. Removed the sata III card and plugged the drive into the on board SATA ports. Then I realised that the SATA III card hadn't presented it's own POST screen last startup, so figured maybe that had gone south, instead. Not as bad as the SSD if that's the case. But alas, no, no system disk found.
Now, I have a linux install on a platter as an emergency backup, so figured I'd boot that and see if I could see what was going on from a running system. No such luck, kernel started to boot and then halted, reporting ata COMRESET failed (errno=-16), and there it stayed. I made a cuppa and left it to see what would happen. Eventually, it got past the error and systemd dumped me into an emergency console. This wasn't wholly unexpected since I'd removed other drives with partitions that are mounted at boot.
A quick edit of fstab to avoid mounting the missing drives, and rebooted. Lo and behold, the system booted without errors. I tentatively started re-introducing drives whilst successfully booting again from the SSD. All went well, so I re-introduced the SATA III card. Still booted, so finally reconnected the SSD to the SATA III card and my system is back to normal.
Now, I'm not a great believer in computers spontaneously fixing themselves, so does anyone have any idea what the ata error reported by the kernel when boot was failing is, what may have caused it, and what would have caused it to right itself? Is it simply a case that getting a kernel to boot (any kernel) with the SSD connected may have sent a signal to the SSD to reset whatever was going wrong, or is there something more malicious at play?
Last edited by Roken (2012-11-27 23:08:29)

Answer 1

I have had the same experience with a brand new mobo and SSD. It happened ~20 consecutive times and since then, it has booted up every day.
I'm thinking of upgrading the motherboard's BIOS (it is EFI, but I guess there is still some kind of firmware involved) and that the problems have been caused by not powering up the SSD in time before it is being detected by the mobo controller.
Zl.