Re: Strange disk corruption with Linux >= 2.6.13

From: Rogério Brito
Date: Tue Sep 27 2005 - 07:23:35 EST


Hi, Grzegorz. Thank you for your response.

On Sep 27, 2005, at 8:43 AM, Grzegorz Kulewski wrote:
What is your southbridge?

The southbridge is a VIA VT82C686.

Maybe there are some problems there with DMA or cables.

Humm, cables. I forgot to check that. I will check that as soon as I wake up. I spent the entire night trying to fix this, but of course, I gave up after some days of effort and decided to ask for help.

Anything in logs?

Nothing in the logs. No oops, no stack trace, no nothing. :-( Oh, now that you mention it, I remember that I also made my Matrox G400 use speed 4x. I will try slowing it down to see if there is any influence on what I see.

Maybe sourthbridge or northbridge is simply overheating? Maybe you have bad power suply? What are readings of temperatures and voltages in BIOS after some heavy disk-memmory activities?

I don't know, because lmsensors doesn't give accurate measurements, unfortunately. :-(

You can use http://pyropus.ca/software/memtester/ to check your memory in linux. You can run cpuburn at the same time. And you can do some disk activity at the same time (for example dd if=/dev/hda bs=200M | md5sum several times to check if it will give the same results).

I had already tried using memtester, but I guess that I was too ambitious with the amount of memory that I tried it to allocate. I will try this, but with my filesystem in read-only mode, as I cannot afford to loose what I have (and Debian's mondo/mind isn't working right now---I already filed a bug report that is shared by others).

I will bet that you have some hardware problem there. You can try to remove the 256MB DDR module and turn HIGHMEM off. You can also try to check each module separately.

I already checked each module separately, but I didn't see any corruption. I guess that I maybe wasn't paying too much attention. I will try it again. Thanks for the suggestion.

And the best choice will be probably to buy new mb (for example Abit KW7 or KV7) because your is very old and it can start to silently break after so many years... Today mbs are very short living parts - 3-4 years and they are broken...

Yes, I was just trying to avoid getting a new system now, with all the transitions going on (i386 -> x86_64 CPUs, PATA -> SATA etc). But my time is also costing me some nights of sleep... :-( It sucks not to be in the US, where things are cheaper. :-(


Thank you very much, Rogério.

--
Rogério Brito : rbrito@xxxxxxxxxx : http://www.ime.usp.br/~rbrito
Homepage of the algorithms package : http://algorithms.berlios.de
Homepage on freshmeat: http://freshmeat.net/projects/algorithms/


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