[Nottingham] Computer woes

[Alex Walker]

On Thu, Jun 05, 2003 at 10:49:18AM +0100, Duncan John Fyfe wrote:
> > > From what little I understand this problem can come about for a
> > > few of reasons: Either the disk is dying - but you may be able to
> > > salvage some of your data before t dies. or the DMA controller is
> > > having trouble.
> The DMA controller 'having trouble' can be because of the drive
> (timings slightly wrong).

Ah OK.  Will try it in another computer at some point.

> Some kernel boot parameters to try:
> 1.	'hdd=slow'     = slow things down a bit.
> 2.	'hdd=noprobe'  = drive is present but don't autoprobe it.
> 3.	'ide1=nodma'   = don't automatically use dma on this interface (I think that is right)

OK, the first one made quite a difference... I can now boot!
However mounting doesn't work, it comes up with the same errors.

I fiddled with dd and did:
dd if=/dev/hdd of=test count=10
to see if I could get anything off it and indeed I could (although it
seemed to take quite a while)  However if I change hdd to hdd1 or any
other partition, I get the errors in my syslog and eventually dd says
reading `/dev/hdd1': Input/output error
8+0 records in
8+0 records out

Also, if I increase to count to 100 on /dev/hdd, it also dies and says:
reading `/dev/hdd': Input/output error
40+0 records in
40+0 records out

> > Not a bad idea... will have to find one first.

> Where in/around Nottingham are you ?
> A friendly list member may be able to help.

I'm in the glorious neighbourhood of Lenton.  But I'm not sure how much
help another person could be... but if anyone's willing and knows stuff
about hard didks, then we could arrange a time to fiddle... after the
weekend tho - cos I'm away Fri morn -> Sun arvo.

Cheers for your help

Alex.

-- 
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ALEX -----(                  -- Espy on #Debian                  )----- X3JA