SATA Freeze on boot with 3.1.0 (NCQ / DRDY Error) => fixed in SVN/3.1.2

[Jon]

After upgrading to 3.1.0 from 3.0.12, none of my VMs will boot using SATA. All four guests are CentOS 5, running on a RHEL 5 AMD host. Three are 64 bit guests, one is 32 bit. IO APIC, PAE/NX, AMD-V and Nested Paging are enabled.

There seem to be a couple of threads on the forums of other users experiencing the same behaviour after upgrading:

​http://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=25421 and ​http://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=25568

The error on boot is:

ata1.00: NCQ disabled due to excessive errors
ata1.00: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x1 SErr 0x0 action 0x6 frozen
...
ata1.00: status: { DRDY }

All of the guests are using Raw Disk access, with LVM running on the host system. For the time being I've switched them all to IDE and this gets around the issue. Attaching VBox log and screenshot from one of the affected guests.

[Jon]

Vbox log of failed boot

[Jon]

Screenshot of boot

[Paul Kronenwetter]

I've seen this on both Windows and Linux hosts but, for me, all the disks have been attached to one of the SATA ports. In one case the disk was a raw VMDK but most of them are virtual disks as files (VDI). In all cases so far moving disks to the IDE bus fixed the problem. I did need to recreate the raw VMDK file to get that to work.

Oddly enough one of the VMs is FreeNAS and I had 5 disks, 4 VDI files and the raw file mentioned before. Fortunately moving only the OS and the RAW disk to the IDE bus was necessary.

[aeichner]

Thanks for the report. This will be fixed in the next minor release.