Data restoration in progress
Right, so the new drive for velius is a SATA-2 device, and the
controller is a VT8237, a SATA-1 controller. Turns out this controller does
not play well at auto-negotiating the rate on the line. The good news is,
there is an undocumented jumper setting for the drive that will
lock it to SATA-1 speeds. The bad news is, once locked to SATA-1, linux
croaks on the drive in a way that was not observed with the prior (SATA-1)
drive.
ata1: qc timeout (cmd 0xef)
ata1: failed to set xfermode, disabled
Oh joy.
Fortunately with the right abuse of kernel parameters, I can get the
drive up and running. So now, the good news is I have 500GB of
storage space online. The device itself seems to be in good condition and
is now loading data from goodness-knows-how-many data discs. The bad news
is, I had to use irqpoll to get to this point.
That's actually pretty bad news... eh, I'll deal with it later. Or if
by some miracle DVD burning hasn't been broken during all this
reconfiguration, I might not...
Some days I just hate technology...