Bug#622340: udev - system hangs about 90 seconds on boot (first line, "Loading, please wait") -> ata1.00: failed command: IDENTIFY PACKET DEVICE

[Frank Heckenbach]

Hi Jort,

> Great comment and recommendation. I was using SB04 and experienced the 90
> second boot delay. Workaround was functioning as described before, however
> udev rules might easily get overwritten so it's not an ideal solution.
> 
> I have a dual boot OS.
> What I did:
> Booted to windows and downloaded the SB07 firmware (auto-flashed from
> executable).
> Rebooted to linux (I'm running mint):
> 
>    - Reinstated the original line from
>    /lib/udev/rules.d/60-persistent-storage.rules
>    - update-initramfs -u
>    - Reboot again and check boot time + dmesg.
> 
> It seems to have worked for me, I tried some other reboots to see whether I
> could get it to break again without 'success'.
> 
> So it might be worth the one time effort for people to plug the drive to a
> windows box and flash it, or boot to win OS.
> 
> Download link I used (official tsstodd):
> http://www.tsstodd.com/TotalLib/popup/Download.asp?path=fwdownload&lang=eng&fname=SH-S223C_SB07.exe
> 
> Note that you should also be able to use MacOS with the separate TSDNMAC
> firmware flash program and extracting the .bin from the windows download
> above (it's just an archive).

Nice that it works for you. OTOH, I don't have any other OS on
my machine, and removing the drive and taking it to a friend's
Windows machine quite frankly seems more effort than the drive is
worth. Probably "cheaper" to buy a new one then. But as long as the
workaround works, I can use this. (If you know a method to upgrade
under Linux, or maybe FreeDos which I could probably set up quickly,
I'd still like to try it.)

I understand that it's the drive that's doing something wrong, but
so far udev is the only thing that seems to have a problem with it,
everything else works fine regardless. It's not the first software
workaround for hardware bugs I've had to use either. (The kernel has
a number of those, and at least one of my former MBs definitely
needed one to use UDMA reliably.) Such is life in the hardware-near
world, so maybe udev could just adapt this little workaround ...

Regards,
Frank