Re: disk problems: which ATA?

[Mike Castle <dalgoda+debian@gmail.com>]

On Sun, Jul 3, 2011 at 11:25 AM, Ross Boylan
<RossBoylan@stanfordalumni.org> wrote:
> How can I tell which ata device is which hard drive?  It's come up
> several times for me, most recently with
> ata2.00: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x0 action 0x6 frozen

Depending on how long since boot, you can often explore the output of
dmesg to figure out which drive is which.

Sometimes what I do is something like this pseudocode:

for disk in /dev/sd?; do
  echo $disk
  smartctl -i $disk | grep -e Model -e Serial
done

And write down each working drive's model and serial number.

Reboot. and do it again.

In many cases, I've been lucky that the failing drive would work for a
little while (say, until a write).  So I could compare the two lists,
and figure out which model/serial is failing, and pull it.

Failing that, I have a list of known good disks, and can go through
all of the disks in the machine until I find the failing one.  And at
that point, since I have the case open, reseat all cables and cards,
just in case that's the problem.

mrc