[Preston] Strange HDD / IDE problems

[Andrew King]

Hi there Matt,

To me, that /sounds/ like it's your hard disk going - in any case, the 
first thing I'd do is make sure you have good backups of it :)  Tis a 
weird coincidence that it's happening to fd0 as well though, but then I 
don't know - floppy disks give errors all the time when I use them, 
regardless of the disk, operating system or machine I'm using - they 
just kind of don't work and screw up nearly all the time.

I'd be tempted to try another hard disk, if you can.

Matthew T. Atkinson wrote:

>'ellow,
>
>I've been having some really weird and quite awful-sounding problems
>with the hard disk in my desktop lately.  I was wondering if anyone has
>ever had similar experiences to these:
>
>* A few times this weekend, everything seemed to hang.  I couldn't
>launch any applications in X.  When I went back to the console I saw
>loads of ``EXT-fs: <some read operation error> sector <big number>''
>messages filling the screen.  I had to reboot the machine to get it back
>to a working state.
>
>* Yesterday it was unable to boot up, the BIOS couldn't see the hard
>disk at one point.  Later on, after I forced the BIOS to re-autodetect
>the HDD, it booted most of the way but sometimes died when entering
>GDM.  The HDD would make horrible turning off/on-type noises.  It would
>die (with the read errors) after only a couple of minutes of being
>turned on.
>
>* This morning, I was desparately trying to get a presentation off it
>that I had done for work and the same errors started happening on the
>floppy drive!
>
>* Now I have come home and it has booted up, so I thought I would try
>e-mailing to see if any of you had experienced anything like this
>before.  I had originally thought it was the HDD but now I am wondering
>if it could be the mobo too/instead.
>
>* At the moment, the floppy drive is still not working correctly
>(input/output errors whenever I try to mkdosfs or dd the disk) and the
>hard drive is causing stutters in music and loading apps up.  Other than
>that it seems relatively OK.
>
>Unfortunately I was using evolution checking my mail every five minutes
>as a way of keeping the ADSL connection alive (still having untracable
>network problems).  I think I have lost some e-mail over the weekend as
>I had to reboot the box whilst evo was open with new mails in it.  I
>have now written a shell script to keep the connection going (will try
>another modem when I get the time).
>
>Needless to say I am a bit cheesed off that I had to rewrite the whole
>presentation again today and now it seems to load up fine (albeit with
>some stuttering whilst OOo loads)!  That's actually quite funny, really
>:-).
>
>FYI, I am running Debian Sid with Linux 2.4.21 and the HDD is a 60GB
>ATA100 (though I am not using the kernel option to enable UDMA mode as I
>didn't know how until very recently).  The filesystem is ext3.  The disk
>is hda and has 3 partitions (one is swap but is hardly ever used).  I
>was never warned by the ``SMART'' thingy on the disk/BIOS that anything
>was wrong.  Last time I had a problem like this (about a year ago, with
>a different HDD) a message from the BIOS warned me about 24 hours before
>it bit the dust.
>
>I have attached 3 files in the hope that they might show something
>useful:
>
>* ``via'' is the result of ``cat /proc/ide/via''
>* ``dmesg_grep_hd'' is the result of ``dmesg | grep hd''
>* ``dmesg_grep_floppy'' is the result of ``dmesg | grep floppy''
>
>The errors in ``dmesg_grep_hd'' are not the ones I was getting yesterday
>(they were from EXT-fs, these are more like timeouts).
>
>If any of you have ever come across anything like this before, I'd
>appreciate any info you might have.  I'll check the web site archives if
>it dies again.
>
>I'll try and run fsck and/or badblock after sending this, but I wanted
>to get this out of the door while I still could :-).
>
>bye just now, thanks in advance for any info you may have,
>  
>