possible IDE hard disk problem

[David Roundy <droundy@abridgegame.org>]

Hello all.

I am getting the following error messages on my thinkpad (along with
nasty crashes):

hda: dma_intr: Status=0x51 { DriveReady Seek Complete Error }
hda: dma_intr: Error=0x40 { Uncorrectable Error }, LBAsect=35053408,
sector=5184
end_request: I/O error, dev=03:09 (hda), sector 5184

My web search revealed a few people saying this meant someone's hard
drive was failing, so I've ordered a replacement hard drive and am
backing up the entire contents of my hard drive to another computer
(just in case...).  The computer (and thus hard drive) is now one and a
half years old, which seems like a short lifetime for a hard drive,
except that I leave it on constantly, and have been using ext3, so it
hasn't been spinning down.

My kernel is 2.4.20, which I compiled just recently, so another
explanation would be that the new kernel is causing IDE problems.
Prior to this kernel I was on 2.4.17, I believe.  For the moment I've
turned off my swap, thinking that that should make hard disk errors
less likely to simply freeze up the system.  I just won't run X in my
unstable chroot...

Any suggestions, advice or wisdom?

David Roundy (hoping someone can tell me that when my new drive arrives
I can just save it for a rainy day)