Re: possible IDE hard disk problem
On Mon, Mar 24, 2003 at 10:29:04AM -0500, David Roundy wrote:
> 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)
>
>
As an aid in determining whether it's really a failing drive vs some
other problem, I'd suggest downloading the test utility from the drive
mauufacturer's web site (IBM's is called Drive Fitness Test), and
running the diagnostic test. It runs from it's own bootable floppy
and it's non destructive to existing data.
Tom
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