FC2 hangs on soft reboot

[Hannes Mayer]

Joe Robertson wrote:
> I am running Fedora Core 2 (final release) on a Supermicro 6013P-T.
> If I do a "shutdown -r now" or ctl-alt-del to cause a reboot,
> the system reboots but hangs when it tries to read the boot sector.
> 
> I have not noticed any other issues related to reading / writing
> data to the hard drives.
> 
> This has sil-3112A SATA hard drive controllers.  I have confirmed
> that the problem goes away if I disable the Silicon Image controllers 
> and use a Promise board.  Engineers at Silicon Image are convinced that
> the incorrect driver is actually being loaded, another driver is 
> grabbing the hardware before sata_sil has a chance to, or even worse 
> two drivers are attempting to grab the same hardware.
> 
> The device name used to access the hard drives is /dev/hdx rather than 
> /dev/sdx as it should be (according to Silicon Image).
> They suggested adding hdx=noprobe for all drives in grub.conf.  I tried
> that
> but the system simply wouldn't boot.  In /etc/modeprobe.conf, there is
> an 
> entry "alias scsi_hostadapter sata_sil" which is correct.  
> 
> Has anyone run into this before?
> 
> Is there another way to ensure the correct driver is being used?
> 
> 
> The second suggestion from Silicon Image is "remove the PCI IDs 
> from drivers/ide/pci/siimage.c, which will ensure that sata_sil is the 
> only driver attempting to use the hardware and then recompile."
> 
> I've figured out how to modify the siimage.c file and build a new
> kernel source rpm file.  However, I have not yet figured out how to
> go to the next step and build a new set of kernel rpm files.  I need
> to be able to package this so I can put the corrected version back into
> my installation tree that I use for NFS inatalls.  
> 
> Can anyone help with instructions or where to find instructions on 
> building and packaging a kernel?
> 
> Thanks,
> Joe Robertson

Joe,

which kernel do you use ?
When I read the subject line, the problem with the older 2.6 kernel came
to my mind, where the kernel sent a standby signal to the harddrives and
some harddrives interpreted this as shutdown. When rebooting the BIOS
didn't spin up the drives and the system didn't boot.
This might be unrelated - just my 2 eurocents ;-)

Cheers,
Hannes.