[Gllug] ATA errors

[Nix]

On 22 Mar 2010, Tethys outgrape:

>
> My backup failed last night, because the device was read only:
>
>> building file list ... done
>> rsync: delete_file: unlink "/backup/local/shared/camera/2009-08-24--foq/img_0507.jpg" failed: Read-only file system (30)
>> rsync: delete_file: unlink "/backup/local/shared/camera/2009-08-24--foq/.xvpics/img_0507.jpg" failed: Read-only file system (30)
>
> That's never a good sign. Looking through the logs, I see a number of
> ATA errors, starting with a timeout, a device error, and a bunch of
> HSM violations. A few examples:

>From (a really old version of) Documentation/libata.tmpl (picked off the
web because I couldn't be bothered to beat up DocBook at this time of
night: original author appears to be Jeff Garzik):

,----
| [1-1-1] HSM (host state machine) violation error
| 
|  This error is indicated when STATUS value doesn't match HSM
| requirement during issuing or excution any ATA/ATAPI command.
| 
| ex) ATA_STATUS doesn't contain !BSY && DRDY && !DRQ while trying to
|     issue a command.
| 
| ex) !BSY && !DRQ during PIO data transfer.
| 
| ex) DRQ on command completion.
| 
|  In this case, HSM is violated and not much information regarding the
| error can be acquired from STATUS or ERROR register.  IOW, this error
| can be anything - software error, faulty device, controller or cable.
| 
|  As HSM is violated, reset is necessary to bring it back to known
| state.  Reconfiguring transport for lower speed might be a good idea
| too as transmission errors do cause this behavior.
`----

I find myself wondering if you had an FS error after that: presumably
you did, as the FS went read-only. Still, if you keep on getting
timeouts, one presumes that sometimes it really times out rather than
retrying, and then the FS would go read-only...

> Any ideas? Does anyone know enough about the ATA spec to tell me what
> these errors actually mean? Is this a genuine hardware failure? If so,
> where's it likely to be? Drive? Controller? Cable?

I hope the above lack of useful information helps :/
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