CentOS - Nov 2010 - Disk operations very slow on Lenovo Thinkcentre

Hi,

I'm currently trying to install CentOS 5.5 on a series of Lenovo 
Thinkcentre nettops. At first, the install CD boots OK without any 
options, but when it comes to formatting, the process can only be 
described as terribly slow... it took about half an hour to format the 
160 GB disk.

A few cups of coffee later, the system boots with the following messages 
on bootup (right at the beginning, when it says "Red Hat Nash 
starting...") :

******************
...
PCI: Cannot allocate resource region 7 of bridge 0000:00:1c.0
...
ata_piix 0000:00:1f.2: no available legacy port
...
******************

And here's the output of lspci :

******************
00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation 82Q963/Q965 Memory Controller Hub 
(rev 02)
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation 82Q963/Q965 
Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 02)
00:1a.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB UHCI 
Controller #4 (rev 02)
00:1a.7 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB2 EHCI 
Controller #2 (rev 02)
00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) HD Audio 
Controller (rev 02)
00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) PCI Express 
Port 1 (rev 02)
00:1c.4 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) PCI Express 
Port 5 (rev 02)
00:1d.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB UHCI 
Controller #1 (rev 02)
00:1d.1 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB UHCI 
Controller #2 (rev 02)
00:1d.2 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB UHCI 
Controller #3 (rev 02)
00:1d.7 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB2 EHCI 
Controller #1 (rev 02)
00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801 PCI Bridge (rev f2)
00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation 82801HB/HR (ICH8/R) LPC Interface 
Controller (rev 02)
00:1f.2 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) 4 port 
SATA IDE Controller (rev 02)
00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) SMBus Controller 
(rev 02)
00:1f.5 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) 2 port 
SATA IDE Controller (rev 02)
03:00.0 Ethernet controller: Broadcom Corporation NetXtreme BCM5755 
Gigabit Ethernet PCI Express (rev 02)
******************

I'm not very proficient about hardware drivers. Most of the things I 
know about them is the mix of information I gathered over the years when 
they didn't work as expected. My haphazard guess here would be that the 
disk is somehow treated as IDE, not as SATA, thus making the read/write 
operations much slower than theoretically possible (which would mean 
that somewhere in the boot process, the wrong driver for the disk is 
loaded). But then, it's only my guess.

Unfortunately, I don't have the slightest idea if there's a possibility 
to correct this behaviour a) during install, through some magic boot 
option maybe, and b) during normal operation once the system is 
installed. Blacklist something and add something else, my vague 
intuition says.

Before going for CentOS 5.5, I booted and installed Fedora 14 on that 
machine, which runs very fast (at least for my standards).

Cheers,

Niki Kovacs

On 11/16/2010 09:25 AM, Niki Kovacs wrote:
> My haphazard guess here would be that the
> disk is somehow treated as IDE, not as SATA, thus making the read/write
> operations much slower than theoretically possible (which would mean
> that somewhere in the boot process, the wrong driver for the disk is
> loaded). But then, it's only my guess.
We've had some HP machines with this behaviour. The trick on them was to
boot with:

hda=noprobe hdc=noprobe

and the disk shows up as sda instead of hda, now working at full speed.

This has to be done during installation and manually added to grub.conf
after the installation.

Mogens
-- 
Mogens Kjaer, mk at lemo.dk
http://www.lemo.dk