[Sussex] Suse 8.1 technical question?

[Steve Dobson]

On Sat, Apr 26, 2003 at 11:21:59PM +0000, Paul Bruce wrote:
> When I boot my Suse 8.1 machine I get the following error
> 
> I/O error, dev 16:40 (hdd), sector 78
> blah
> blah
> blah
> 
> (interpret "blah" as me being too lazy to type out the same thing over and 
> over again)
> 
> hdd is one of my IDE CD  ROMs (that operates under SCSI emulation)
> A search of the SUSE database gave no obvious answer.  Do any of you super 
> geeks know what the error refers to? :-)

When the disk drive interrupts to say that it has completed a command
(to read date to/write data from the disk) it indicates weather the 
command completed or not.  If the command did not complete then it
reports this type of error.

Any I/O error with the disk is something to worry about.  The more sectors
that are reporting problems the more damage your disk has.  My guess is
at you've had a head crash.  Get any important data off that disk now.
It's time to dip your hand in your pocket and get a new disk.

You might be able to partition the disk so that the damaged sectors are
not used.  I did this once, many moons ago, with a SCSI disk that some
chap brought into the shop I was in at the time.  I bought it off him for
a fiver, and five plus years ago any SCSI disk for a fiver was a steal.

But when a disk starts to go wrong I think it is time to stop storing
important data on it.

Steve