[Bug 82486] [feisty] very nasty bug with libata

[José M. López-Cepero]

Public bug reported:

Binary package hint: linux

I had a laptop with Ubuntu 6.06 LTS. I updated it to Edgy and then to
Feisty and everything seemed to go okay. However, the system would not
boot after that. It would stay almost dead with only a little bit of the
boot process bar active, then drop to a shell after a few minutes.

After _lots_ of pulling my hair, I found that the cause was a file
called "libata.modprobe" in /etc/modprobe.d. The file contained the line
"options libata printk=255", and, upon booting, libata would complain of
the "printk" option being unknown... and refuse to load. Since all my
hard drives are SATA, that meant the initrd system didn't see the root
drive and thus hanged. Commenting out the option line and regenerating
the initrd solved the problem.

Two thoughts.

First: What package is responsible for the libata.modprobe file? I'd
guess this is modutils. Maybe I was caught in a bad update, or something
like that. In that case, it would be nice for subsequent updates to
correct the problem. I did chroot to my Feisty installation and apt-get
update/dist-upgrade, to no avail.

Second: Why does a critical module, such as libata, not load because of
an "unknown option"? It does not seem right to me. Wouldn't it be _much_
more sensible to just ignore the erroneous option and go on? That would
have avoided the problem...

Hope this helps someone.

** Affects: linux-meta (Ubuntu)
     Importance: Undecided
         Status: Unconfirmed

-- 
[feisty] very nasty bug with libata
https://launchpad.net/bugs/82486