Question about "Not Ready" SCSI error

[Patrick Mau]

Hallo everyone

Today one of my SCSI drives decided to shutdown for no obvious reason.
I suspect heat or a bad power supply. Syslog shows a repeating stream
of the following:

Jul 30 15:51:30 tony kernel: sd 0:0:0:0: Device not ready: <6>: Current: sense key=0x2
Jul 30 15:51:30 tony kernel: ASC=0x4 ASCQ=0x2
Jul 30 15:51:30 tony kernel: end_request: I/O error, dev sda, sector 617358

Google revealed[1] that the drive is waiting for a START UNIT command,
but it seems that the kernel is not attempting to spin up the drive
again. 

After a complete power-cycle the drive worked again. I just wanted to
know if this is a shortcoming in the SCSI error handling codepath.

Regards,
Patrick

Additional Info:

Kernel:		2.6.18-git (from 29-July-2006)

SCSI HW:	Adaptec 3960D Ultra160 SCSI adapter
		aic7899: Ultra160 Wide Channel A, SCSI Id=7, 32/253 SCBs

Harddisk:	Vendor: IBM
		Model: IC35L036UCD210-0
		Rev: S5BA
		Type: Direct-Access
		ANSI SCSI revision: 03
		Tagged Queuing enabled.  Depth 64
		FAST-80 WIDE SCSI 160.0 MB/s DT (12.5 ns, offset 63)

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KCQ
2     04      02      Not Ready - need initialise command (start unit)

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