Ubuntu Slow Boot: “ata8: SRST failed (error:-16)”
by Craig Mayhew on Sep.29, 2009, under Guides/Fixes, Linux/Ubuntu
Ubuntu has started being a little slow to boot, as it turns out one of the drives was the cause of this. During the boot up processes ubuntu would hang for a while and then spit out the following: “ata8: SRST failed (error:-16)”. It seems one of my drives wasn’t responding properly during boot up.
To fix this I tried:
- Disabling floppy drive in bios (This didn’t help, but I’m sure it will speed things up slightly as I don’t have a floppy drive)
- Set the “IDE detect time out (sec)” to 0. It was originally 35. (This didn’t help. Be careful when changing this option if you are using IDE drives)
- Unplugged the SATA cable from my DVD drive and plugged it back in again. (PROBLEM SOLVED!)
I imagine either my sata cable is slightly loose or dodgy and reseating it has sorted the problem. If the problem occurs again then I will replace the cable.
