Problem with two SATA Controllers - not all hard drives detected

[johannes-z]

Hello! I have a weird problem. My Mainboard has two SATA Controllers, and for some reason, 99% of the time one of the two controllers (always the same) doesn't show up in proxmox, and no hard drives are detected. But I can't even see them in the BIOS.

The Mainboard is an ASROCK J5005-ITX. The manual says about SATA:

• 2 x SATA3 6.0 Gb/s Connectors, support NCQ, AHCI and Hot Plug
• 2 x SATA3 6.0 Gb/s Connectors by ASMedia ASM1061, support NCQ, AHCI and Hot Plug

I have 4 HDDs connected. Ports SATA3_A1 and SATA3_A2 don't detect a hard drive.

It worked for weeks until I had to restart today, and now the hard drives won't show up anymore. When swapping the SATA cables around the undetected hard drives work (on SATA3_1 and SATA3_2), so it's not the cables and it's not the hard drives.
Weirdly enough I had this problem before and it *just went away*, but I don't know what I did to fix it (if I even did anything and it wasn't pure chance), and now I can't seem to fix it again.

I'm on PVE7 and kernel version `5.19.17-2`.

# lspci
00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Gemini Lake Host Bridge (rev 03)
00:00.1 Signal processing controller: Intel Corporation Celeron/Pentium Silver Processor Dynamic Platform and Thermal Framework Processor Participant (rev 03)
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation GeminiLake [UHD Graphics 605] (rev 03)
00:0e.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation Celeron/Pentium Silver Processor High Definition Audio (rev 03)
00:0f.0 Communication controller: Intel Corporation Celeron/Pentium Silver Processor Trusted Execution Engine Interface (rev 03)
00:12.0 SATA controller: Intel Corporation Celeron/Pentium Silver Processor SATA Controller (rev 03)
00:13.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Gemini Lake PCI Express Root Port (rev f3)
00:13.1 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Gemini Lake PCI Express Root Port (rev f3)
00:13.2 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Gemini Lake PCI Express Root Port (rev f3)
00:15.0 USB controller: Intel Corporation Celeron/Pentium Silver Processor USB 3.0 xHCI Controller (rev 03)
00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation Celeron/Pentium Silver Processor LPC Controller (rev 03)
00:1f.1 SMBus: Intel Corporation Celeron/Pentium Silver Processor Gaussian Mixture Model (rev 03)
03:00.0 Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8111/8168/8411 PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet Controller (rev 15)

# cat /etc/default/grub
GRUB_DEFAULT=0
GRUB_TIMEOUT=5
GRUB_DISTRIBUTOR=`lsb_release -i -s 2> /dev/null || echo Debian`
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet intel_iommu=on initcall_blacklist=sysfb_init"
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX=""

# cat /etc/modules
vfio
vfio_iommu_type1
vfio_pci
vfio_virqfd

Edit: Additional info:

00:12.0 SATA controller: Intel Corporation Celeron/Pentium Silver Processor SATA Controller (rev 03) (prog-if 01 [AHCI 1.0])
        DeviceName: Onboard - SATA
        Subsystem: ASRock Incorporation Device 31e3
        Flags: bus master, 66MHz, medium devsel, latency 0, IRQ 126
        Memory at a1214000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=8K]
        Memory at a1218000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=256]
        I/O ports at f090 [size=8]
        I/O ports at f080 [size=4]
        I/O ports at f060 [size=32]
        Memory at a1217000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=2K]
        Capabilities: [80] MSI: Enable+ Count=1/1 Maskable- 64bit-
        Capabilities: [70] Power Management version 3
        Capabilities: [a8] SATA HBA v1.0
        Kernel driver in use: ahci
        Kernel modules: ahci

In BIOS I have AHCI enabled (there is no other mode).

 

[Max Carrara]

I found a thread with a similar issue; the OP mentions in his post:

PS. If I shutdown the PC there is a high probability that all HDDs will be detected on boot. The problem often happens exactly after rebooting.

So, perhaps you're running into a similar situation - so it's worth checking if there's a difference between shutting your host down and then booting it again versus just rebooting.

Also, in case you have fast boot enabled, you could try disabling it.

 

[johannes-z]

Thank you for your help, but it didn't work.
I've since then tested all possible configurations, but to no avail. I've tried another linux live disk and it didn't work there either, so it has nothing to do with Proxmox. I guess this can be *closed*.

 

[Max Carrara]

Aw, what a shame. Seems like a hardware issue then, unfortunately.

For what it's worth, have you also tried to clear your mobo's CMOS? I doubt it will do anything, but hey, might be worth a shot. Sometimes works wonders for me.