[olug] Hard Drive Failure?

[William E. Kempf]

> From: ktb <xyf at nixnotes.org>
> On Mon, Feb 10, 2003 at 10:26:30AM -0500, William E. Kempf wrote:
> > Had a bad weekend.  Some of you know from the last Install Fest that I had a HD going bad.  Well, I replaced it last week with a brand new 80 GB Western Digital.  From the very beginning I was nervous... the drive seemed fairly loud to me (not the spinning of the platters, but the movement of the head) and it sure *seemed* to be running slower than my previous drive when I expected it to be faster.  But it appeared to be running properly and a forced fsck didn't reveal any problems (that's the extent of my diagnotic abilities using Linux, so if there's other things I should have done, let me know).
> > 
> > It ran for most of the week.  Twice during the week I had the entire system lock up, but didn't know what the culprit was.  Then Friday things started to get worse.  I had to reboot because the system was locked up, and though the OS would come up, it ran so slowly as to be basically unusable.  I fought with trying to diagnose the problem for a little while, and another reboot resulted in the error "no drq after issuing write" displayed by the kernel.  Eventually I also received errors such as (and this is from memory, so not 100% accurate) "dma_intr status=0x61 {DeviceReady DeviceFault Error}" and the same thing basically but with status=0x04.  Amazingly, on two different reboots the BIOS couldn't even detect the drive, and I had to do a cold boot to get the BIOS to recognize the drive's presence again.
> > 
> <snip>
> 
> Please set your mailer to wrap at 72 characters as it raises havoc with
> those of us who use text based mailers.

Sorry, but until I can get this system running again, I'm basically stuck with using Cox's webmail, which I can't configure in this way.

> I would try looking at your dma settings.  Do a search for "hdparm" and
> your specific error message.  This might also be of use -

I can't use hdparm if I can't boot to the drive ;).

I also spent a significant amount of time searching on these error messages, and got only a bunch of conflicting answers.  Some suggest this is nothing, others say it's a sign of a failing HD, and yet others say it's something that needs to be adjusted through hdparm (but they disagree on what needs adjusting, and since I can't boot into the drive to use hdparm...).

> http://www.linuxgazette.com/issue76/tag/10.html

Thanks.  I'll check this link. 

Bill Kempf

William E. Kempf
wekempf at cox.net