AHCI: what does it mean if the drive is busy forever?

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BenLunt
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Re: AHCI: what does it mean if the drive is busy forever?

Post by BenLunt »

mariuszp wrote:Sometimes (typically after a reboot) on physical hardware, the AHCI controller gets stuck in a state where the "BSY" bit is set in PxTFD, and never clears. bits 4 and 6 ("command-specific") are set too: I'm not sure where to look up the meanings of those.

I have 2 questions:
1) Am I supopsed to do a full port reset whenever my driver loads? Or am I supposed to assume the firmware initialised them?
2) What does it mean if the BSY bit is just set forever?
1) Don't assume anything. Assume will get you in trouble really fast.
2) I have a machine that the "BSY bit is just set forever". I am quite sure that the controller or the drive is bad, though I don't wish to spend the $50 to replace the drive just to see if it was the drive. (no, I don't have another matching laptop to place this drive into... :-)

Ben
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