How to tell Linux Kernel > 3.0 to completely ignore a failing disk?

I have a Samsung laptop (Chronos s7) with one SATA hard disk on bus ata:1, which is detected as /dev/sda, an 8G SSD on ata:2, /dev/sdb, and various other devices on the rest of SATA interface.

The problem is that the SSD disk is

• soldered to the main board (unmovable)
• busted (it just gives I/O errors for any operation)
• it does not appear in the bios (probably because it is broken)

Now this disk:

• delays the boot three to five minutes trying to probe the failing disk, which is annoying;
• but the most annoying thing is that the system fails to suspend due to /dev/sdb failing.

Notice that I can live with the delay at boot --- what worries me is the resume/suspend thing.

So the question is: can I tell the kernel to avoid even probing the device on ata:2?

In older kernel (<3.0), when I was still able to dig a bit into the source, there was a command-line parameter of the style hdb=ignore that would have done the trick.

I have tried all the tricks proposed below with udev and libata:force kernel parameters, to no avail. Specifically, the following does not work:

1. Adding to one of the following /etc/udev/rules.d/ a file (in early execution like 00-ignoredisk.rules or in late as 99-ignoredisk.rules or in both places)

   SUBSYSTEMS=="scsi", DRIVERS=="sd", ATTRS{rev}=="SSD ", ATTRS{model}=="SanDisk iSSD P4 ", ENV{UDISKS_IGNORE}="1" 
   

   nor

   KERNEL=="sdb", ENV{UDISKS_IGNORE}="1"
   

   nor a lot of intermediate solutions --- this makes the disk not accessible after boot, but it is probed at boot, and still checked when suspending --- causing the suspend to fail.

2. Editing the system files /lib/udev/rules.d/60-persistent-storage.rules (and udisks, udisks2) changing

   KERNEL=="ram*|loop*|fd*|nbd*|gnbd*|dm-|md", GOTO="persistent_storage_end"
   

   to

   KERNEL=="ram*|loop*|fd*|nbd*|gnbd*|dm-|md|sdb*", GOTO="persistent_storage_end"
   

   again, this has some effect, masking the disk from userspace, but the disk is still visible to the kernel.

3. Booting with all the possible combinations (well, a lot of them) of the libata:force parameters (found for example here) in order to disable DMA, lower speed or whatever about the failing disk --- does not work. The parameter is used, but the disk is still probed and fails.

   Full udevadm info -a -n /dev/sdb pasted to http://paste.ubuntu.com/6186145/

   smartctl -i /dev/sdb -T permissive gives:

   root@samsung-romano:/home/romano# smartctl -i /dev/sdb -T permissive
   smartctl 5.43 2012-06-30 r3573 [x86_64-linux-3.8.0-31-generic] (local build)
   Copyright (C) 2002-12 by Bruce Allen, http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net
   
   Vendor:               /1:0:0:0
   Product:              
   User Capacity:        600,332,565,813,390,450 bytes [600 PB]
   Logical block size:   774843950 bytes
   >> Terminate command early due to bad response to IEC mode page
   

   which is clearly wrong. Nevertheless:

   root@samsung-romano:/home/romano# fdisk -b 512 -C 970 -H 256 -S 63 /dev/sdb
   fdisk: unable to read /dev/sdb: Input/output error
   

(SSD data from http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1935699&p=11739579#post11739579 ).