Re: Laptop mode causing writes to wrong sectors?

From: Bart Samwel
Date: Thu Nov 17 2005 - 06:54:35 EST


Jan Niehusmann wrote:
No ide errors at all in the kernel logs, which cover more than one
month.
>
What's your hardware? A Thinkpad perhaps?

ASUS M2400N with a SAMSUNG MP0804H 80GB hard drive (this is not
the original hard drive - the notbook was delivered with a 60GB
drive). Centrino chipset, 1.6GHz Pentium M. Hard drive running in udma5
mode. 512MB RAM, Intel Pro Wireless 2100 replaced with an Intel Pro
Wireless 2200 wireless lan card, and a CardMan 4000 card reader in the
pccard slot - not that I think these have any influence on the hard drive,
but this is the complete hardware description.

Thanks. The reason I asked whether it was a Thinkpad is that the DMA problems usually occur on Thinkpads. You don't have a thinkpad, and you don't see the log messages, so that's not it. The filesystem's block bitmaps were OK, so that's not it. Quoting you in your previous message:

# I suspected the hard drive to mess up write requests during spin-up.
# Or perhaps giving some kind of error message, which could trigger a
# bug in a rarely tested error-handling path in the kernel. But the fact
# that you never got similar reports makes this less likely. In the end,
# I have to consider there may be some bad hardware in my laptop.

If there are no other reports on different hardware, then I'm afraid you might be right about the hardware thing. :( I think problems like these usually don't get noticed/fixed because modern Windows versions are actually very lousy at spinning down disks -- in my experience it doesn't really happen, even though you can set the timeouts.

I'm sorry I'm not able to help you out here.

--Bart
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