# Second hard drive --> crash

## sheepdog

After adding a second hard drive I find the system crashes when doing long disk-to-disk copies.  I'm mystified so any help would be much appreciated.

The crashes occur with PartImage, tar, dar, and rdiff-backup.  They occur even in single user mode with the root disk mounted read-only.  Otherwise the disk can be mounted, read and short copying can be done without a problem.

While booting a message appears saying "No 80 connector cable attached."  I have no idea what this means.  The first hard drive is on channel 0 and at boot it is listed as ATA100.  The new HD (Western Digital) is on IDE channel 1 and at boot it is listed as ATA33.

Thank you for reading.

Hardware details:

 *Quote:*   

> 
> 
>     capabilities: smbios-2.2 dmi-2.2
> 
>   *-core
> ...

 

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## fido

Well, I would suggest spending a few dollars at your local computer shack and picking up an 80-pin ide cable. It sounds like that might be worth looking into.

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## Nermal

an 80 pin IDE cable is basically an IDE cable with twice as many wires  :Smile: 

Only 40 are connected though, the other 40 are inbetween each data wire as spacers to prevent interference when operating at speeds higher than UDMA 33.

To be honest, I would get an 80 pin cable, as running another hdd at speeds higher than UDMA 33 on a 40 way cable is likely to cause corruption and nasty stuff to happen  :Neutral: 

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## prince

Funny, I noticed the same problem after adding a second harddrive (same model as the first) which is much more quiet and wanted to mirror my system using dd. Browsing forums and playing with some kernel parameters brought up 

```
[*] Local APIC support on uniprocessors
```

fscked it up for me. You may want to try disabeling that. As I use the same ide-driver (amd74xx) as you do, it may point out a problem using that driver and doing fast transfers over the bus while having that APIC-support enabled. A dirty dirty workaround that worked for me is running some  numbercrunching like Seti@home in the background, so traffic doesn't become too fast, but I guess you have to believe in it  :Wink: 

I run 2.4.20-rc6 gentoo-sources, but using 2.4.22 vanilla-sources results in the same unstable behaviour for me. Maybe anyone complaining about "random lockups" should try and disable APIC especially running those kernel-versions.

Hope that helps!

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## sheepdog

Thanks for all the input.

I changed the cable and now the HD comes up with ATA100.  And I examined my kernel settings and noticed that I had the kernel set for a Pentium when I am using an Athlon MP.  Changing this eliminated the ACPI parameter.  Unfortunately, none of this has improved the situation.  Same problems continue.

Any further ideas?

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## prince

Hello there...

 *sheepdog wrote:*   

> Changing this eliminated the ACPI parameter.

 

Maybe that was just a typo of yours but ACPI does not equal APIC. Roughly speaking the first one is about your power supply, power button, fans, temperature, etc. while the second one is about controlling system resources. The option 

```
[*] Local APIC support on uniprocessors
```

can be found in the menu "Processor type and features" and I was suggesting to disable it. I hope I didn't get you wrong but that APIC != ACPI used to confuse me und I just hope I'm not the only one who got confused  :Wink: 

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## fishhead

I'm not sure about this 100%, but you might want to make sure your power supply can handle the extra load of the second hard drive. I believe an overtaxed power supply can lead to failures, but I'd look into software issues (like your kernel config) first.

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## sheepdog

 *Quote:*   

> APIC != ACPI 

 

Yes, I had been confused.  Thank you for pointing this out.

However, I have been over and over the kernel parameters in both menuconfig and xconfig and this parameter is not settable in "Processor types" or in "General Setup".  It looks as though it should be settable in General Setup since if I edit the .config file I see

```

#

# General setup

#

CONFIG_NET=y

CONFIG_X86_IO_APIC=y

CONFIG_X86_LOCAL_APIC=y

CONFIG_PCI=y

# CONFIG_PCI_GOBIOS is not set

# CONFIG_PCI_GODIRECT is not set

CONFIG_PCI_GOANY=y

CONFIG_PCI_BIOS=y

CONFIG_PCI_DIRECT=y

CONFIG_ISA=y

CONFIG_PCI_NAMES=y

# CONFIG_EISA is not set

# CONFIG_MCA is not set

CONFIG_HOTPLUG=y

```

But in menuconfig this option does not appear at all and is not settable.

I'm reluctant to simply edit the change in the .config file directly.  Should I try this?

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## prince

 *sheepdog wrote:*   

> I'm reluctant to simply edit the change in the .config file directly.  Should I try this?

 

Trying won't hurt, just backup your old kernel  :Wink:  If you disable LOCAL_APIC you also have to say no to IO_APIC. I don't know if there are any other dependencies but i guess there aren't. Please correct me if I'm wrong. So this is how it should look like:

```

CONFIG_X86_IO_APIC=n

CONFIG_X86_LOCAL_APIC=n

```

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## sheepdog

I tried editing the .config file as you indicated.  There is, in fact, one other location where APIC is referenced but I left that "y".  Then, of course, I did 

```
make oldconfig
```

, as is necessary when manually modifying the .config.  After building and installing the new kernel I tested it and it failed just as did the kernel before it.

I went back and looked at the APIC values in my .config file and they were all "y"?!  So I modified them again, confirmed that they were set to "n" and did 

```
make oldconfig
```

 again.  Now they were back to "y".  So the make oldconfig forces these to "y", I guess because I have specified SMP, since I have a dual processor machine.

From my reading it would indicate that it isn't a good idea to turn off APIC in an SMP machine.  At least performance is severely degraded.  At worse multithreaded programs may not work.

Anyone know to whom I might report this problem as a bug?

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