Continuing the saga: F9alpha AMD-64 HP DC7700 SFF switch_root: no filesystems

[Michal Jaegermann]

On Wed, Mar 12, 2008 at 09:32:05AM +0900, John Summerfield wrote:
> Michal Jaegermann wrote:
> >
> >Does the following look familiar?
> Looks familiar, but I don't think it's the same. I don't get a timeout. 

That is true.  Still there are close analogies.  Not sure but
that timeout could be an effect of BIOS (possibly indirectly).
Or maybe this is another surprise from libata.

> 
> nvidia chips. Mine are Chipzilla.
> >http://lkml.org/lkml/2008/3/9/136

So you are using ata_piix.  Does not change the general issue.

> 
> The Jones boy think it's mkinitrd. I'm sceptical,

I think that you are right.  A picture you attached may suggest
initrd, as this is only a small fragment, but dmesg you posted from
2.6.25-0.90.rc3.git5.fc9 shows that

.....
ata1: SATA link down (SStatus 221 SControl 300)          <----!!!
ata2: SATA link up 1.5 Gbps (SStatus 113 SControl 300)
ata2.00: ATAPI: PIONEER DVD-RW  DVR-212, 1.21, max UDMA/66
ata2.00: configured for UDMA/66
scsi 1:0:0:0: CD-ROM            PIONEER  DVD-RW  DVR-212  1.21 PQ: 0 ANSI: 5
.....

So your CD-ROM is identified but you have no disk.  If you are not
booting from somewhere else into a ramdisk it is hard to expect for
this to work.

"Lost disks" is what basically happened in bugzilla 436591.
I got around, but not without other side-effects, by replacing
BIOS; but I mention in comments other reports of the same sort.

  Michal