Re: IDE kernel messages after potato install
FWIW, I used to have a very similar laptop (Solo 9300, but a 400 Mhz
CPU with less memory and drive space). I went through three disk
drives on it. I believe the problem is heat; the drive sits directly
underneath your left palm and gets _very_ hot after several hours of
usage. For the third drive, I bought a 9.5mm instead of a 11.5mm,
thinking that the 2mm air gap that it would provide might solve the
problem. The heat level was noticably decreased and I never had any
problems with it.
The point of this tale is these error messages started happening about
a week before each of the drives failed. The next symptom was an
intermittant grinding sound. Both symptoms became more frequent until
the drives became unusable.
In the depths of that dark day Tue Jul 17, the words of Brian P. Flaherty were the beacon:
> Hello,
>
> I am not trying to spam the debian mail lists, I am simply trying to
> get the opinions of people more knowledgeable than I. The original
> message sent to debian-user follows. Any thoughts will be appreciated.
>
> > Hello,
> >
> > I have had two messages in kern.log since installing potato 2.2-r3
> > yesterday. First, brief background: Gateway Solo 9300 with a 450 Mhz
> > Pentium, 288 MB RAM, 12 GB IDE hd and IDE CDROM. Phoenix BIOS 16.53.
> > Windows 98 currently resides on /dev/hda1, but I haven't added it back
> > to lilo yet. I have been running RH 6.2 and then 7.0 on it without
> > any obvious problems. The first problem occurred when I was
> > un'tarring a pretty big file, my old /usr/local/ directory:
> >
> > Jul 16 04:33:55 wenho kernel: hda: read_intr: status=0x59
> > { DriveReady SeekComplete DataRequest Error }
> > Jul 16 04:33:55 wenho kernel: hda: read_intr: error=0x40
> > { UncorrectableError }, LBAsect=16490098, sector=3188215
> > Jul 16 04:33:55 wenho kernel: end_request: I/O error,
> > dev 03:06 (hda), sector 3188215
> >
> > In looking on the web, it looks like people have said that this is a
> > hardware error, but it seems strange that a hd error would just pop up
> > the day after I install Debian.
> >
> > The second one is a clock time error that occurred when installing
> > software from a CDROM:
> >
> > Jul 16 15:18:36 wenho kernel: probable hardware bug: clock timer
> > configuration lost - probably a VIA686a.
> > Jul 16 15:18:36 wenho kernel: probable hardware bug: restoring
> > chip configuration.
> >
> > So, my question is are these really hardware problems that Debian is
> > showing me and other OS's hide or don't notice? Or could these errors
> > be due to the fact that I am using the kernel off the Debian CD?
> > Might they disappear if I build my own kernel? Finally, are these
> > significant? Do they occur and then the system tries again and then
> > it works, or are these serious errors that should be corrected?
> >
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