Hard drive issue
Using a debian sarge system, with postfix and courier-imap.
Yesterday morning I started having IMAP connectivity problems with this
mail server. Going to the box itself I discovered that the following
error was occurring repeatedly:
kernel: end_request: I/O error, dev hdc, sector 61870207
kernel: EXT3-fs error (device hdc1): ext3_find_entry: reading directory
#3866625 offset 0
So, I was certain this meant my HD was giving out on me.
After rebooting the system seemed fine for about 30 min. But then the
same error starting occurring.
Again I had to reboot. Right after rebooting I shut all mail services
down, and unmounted the drive in question (mounted as /home). Whereas I
had another drive by the same manufacturer and the exact same type
(size, etc.) I then decided to copy all of the failing drive to the new
one. (i.e.: dd if=/dev/hdc of=/dev/hdd)
By all calculations (the drive was 80 G), this copy process should have
taken no more than 50 min. Well over an hour and a half later I decided
to stop the copying. I mounted the new drive just to look at it. It
looked as though everything was there. But even a simple command as du
on the file structure and size caused that process to hang. No matter
what I tried I could not stop the process so I had to reboot.
I set /dev/hdc back to /home in fstab and rebooted. As I expected
everything worked. But I was expecting meltdown at any minute. Well,
that was yesterday. The system has been running since without a single
error. So, what am I supposed to make of this?
Curtis
Reply to: