disabling libata and using IDE driver

Hey everyone,

Seeing as how there's a particular bug with (what appears to be) libata + ubuntu edgy on certain machines, I was wondering if it's possible to somehow disable or uninstall the libata driver and use just the regular IDE driver? My hard drive is an IDE drive and I don't think I'd really need libata to manage it.

Any help would be great.

AuroraS

 

Unfortunately, you almost certainly do need it. ATA is how drives are communicated with. PATA (Parallel ATA) is also known as IDE, and SATA is the newer, serial method of communication to IDE devices. Do the people on the ubuntu forums have any insight? Do you know what the bug is? Any links to info you've already found?

 

I sure do!
At first the bug was thought to have something to do with the Teardown feature used in Edgy... but later on it was assumed to be the libata driver. Still no word from any Ubuntu programmers.

https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux-source-2.6.17/+bug/67810

One person has said that they managed to disable libata and the problem went away... which is what I'm trying to do, although I'm still fairly new to linux and I'm not sure how I'd go about doing that.

 

libata seems to be part of the kernel, so what you'd need to do is reconfigure and recompile your kernel, using the same configuration you have now, except you'd want to disable the CONFIG_ATA option in it. There should be some ubuntu guides for recompiling your kernel out there... follow one of those.

Edit: Just did some more research. You might consider downgrading your kernel to a version before 2.6.19. I'm not sure of the exact procedure, but I think you should be able to pick older versions of packages from within Synaptic.

 

Thanks for the reply, Pitabred, but I'm sure there's an easier way around it. Libata is just a driver and it would be unlikely that I would need to recompile the entire kernel just to disable it. For example, if you look at your /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-pata file, you can see at the top that it reads there are two drivers: libata and old-IDE. There's gotta be an easier way to disable libata...

 

Well, I'm shelling into my machine at home, and that was just a quick search while I was doing other stuff here at the office

What you want to do is edit the blacklist-pata file, and put a # before all the lines that don't have one, and remove the # from all the lines that already have one. Make sure you have your livecd, as it is quite possible for this to render the system unbootable, but very unlikely. Then check your /etc/fstab file and make sure any references to your hard drive or CDROM drive as /dev/sda# are rewritten as /dev/hda# (with # being the partition number.) After that, reboot, and you should be good to go.

I would recommend copying both /etc/modprobe.d/blaclist-pata and /etc/fstab to your home directory as a backup before editing them, so you can easily undo it with a LiveCD. If you have a problem on reboot, things not loading and all, post here and I'll walk you through rolling the changes back from a LiveCD.

 

Okay... I'll give that a shot and see what happens. Wish me luck!

UPDATE: I tried what you told me to do... to no avail. I changed the blacklist-pata file and changed the fstab file but nothing changed when I restarted; in fact, I didn't even have to change the fstab file because it still bootup anyway. I still see my drives as "sda".

 

So what you're saying is that your blacklist-pata file now looks like this, right?

Code:

# There are two possible drivers for each PATA (old IDE) controller,
# the newer libata driver that exposes the drives as /dev/sd* and the old
# ide subsystem driver that exposes the drives as /dev/hd*.
#
# Choose wisely, my friend.

#blacklist pata_amd
blacklist amd74xx

#blacklist pata_atiixp
blacklist atiixp

#blacklist pata_cs5530
blacklist cs5530

#blacklist pata_cs5535
blacklist cs5535

#blacklist pata_hpt34x
blacklist hpt34x

#blacklist pata_netcell

#blacklist pata_ns87410

#blacklist pata_sil680
blacklist siimage

#blacklist pata_via
blacklist via82cxxx

You know, the more I look at it, you should just have this file in the reverse, so the pata lines are blacklisted. If that doesn't do it, you may have to ask the ubuntu geeks on the ubuntu forums, as I haven't run into this or had to solve it myself, and I don't know everything about the ATA subsystems.

 

I dont have an answer to your problems, but you should also check the #ubuntu channel on freenode (IRC)