ATA: Slow to Respond Errors? Check your cables
I recently had to reboot a machine following a kernel upgrade and was getting the “ATA: Slow to respond” error. Googling the error message left me with nothing but the fact it was a kernel issue. I made some changes and rebooted the machine to the previous kernel version. Before I even got that far, I noticed BIOS was hanging when detecting the drives.
Great, I have a bad hard drive. Luckilly they were mirrored, which was why the system still booted. I decided to power it down and just double check the all the cables. When I booted it up again, it detected the drive fine and the system booted without an issue. The system is running fine now and I haven’t determined it the drive is going bad, the cable is bad, or the SATA port on the motherboard is going bad.
Either way, if you start getting random “ATA: Slow to respond” errors, check the cables and check BIOS to make sure the drive is even recognized.
