Hi, I was able to recover the system by going back to a pre upgrade backup, and I think the problem may be more related to the version of grub in 12.04 than the kernel.
First thing I tried was booting a 12.04 live USB and using boot-repair. That caused the same SATA timeouts. I tried the same live USB but instead of boot-repair mounted up my system's root partition (and bind mounted /dev, /sys, /proc), chroot into it and did a grub-setup /dev/sda1. Same timeouts and loss of access to the system's root drive. Then I tried a 11.10 live USB with grub-setup /dev/sda1. That also failed, but given that it was 11.10's kernel and 12.04's grub (since I was running grub from the chroot) I think that may point to 12.04's grub being the key problem. At that point I figured my 12.04 upgrade was a lost cause so I booted up the live USB, made a new filesystem on /dev/sda1 (all the time monitoring the kernel log to watch for timeouts), and restored a backup from the day before the attempted upgrade. No issues so far. chroot'ed into the restored copy, update-grub to update the fs's UUID in grub.conf. Then when I ran grub-setup /dev/sda1 I saw the errors in dmesg but it didn't cause loss of drive access or any harm that I could find. Plus it worked, I rebooted into my restored 11.10 system with no problems. I'll attach a copy of my dmesg from that whole live-usb restore session, the ata errors happened during grub-setup to reinstall the boot loader. The system has been up and running in 11.10 for 20 hours now doing work (it is a zoneminder server running mysql and a lot of heavy jpeg processing) with no further ata errors. Thanks, Dave ** Attachment added: "liveusb-11.10-grub.txt" https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/991094/+attachment/3121397/+files/liveusb-11.10-grub.txt -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Bugs, which is subscribed to Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/991094 Title: Can no longer access HDDs after 12.04 update, can't boot To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/991094/+subscriptions -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list [email protected] https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs
