Re: Possible hardware failure? Cryptic kernel messages...

Noah Beck (noah@ecn.purdue.edu)
Sat, 14 Mar 1998 14:54:35 -0500


I've never seen those sorts of errors without bad hardware present.
I would:

Back up the data on the disk as much as possible (I suspect you'll
get read errors around that sector).

Make (or find) a rescue floppy that has badblocks on it (that's
badblocks the program)

Boot with that floppy, and use badblocks' -w option to write 0101,
1010, 0000, 1111 to every location on the disk. It should fail
somewhere. This is to make sure you have a bad spot on your drive.

Bad disk sectors cannot, as far as I know, be made not bad, however,
I was once told that if you do a low-level format on the drive, the
drive's internal logic will remember not to use the bad sectors. I
don't know where to get a low-level formatting utility from. If
this works, the overall size of your drive will be slightly smaller
than it used to be, but all of the sectors should be good. Then
you can re-partition and re-ext2-format it.

Oh yeah, and put up a barricade around it to avoid this problem in
the future. :)

Noah

Eric Skaug wrote:
>
> I need help. The other day a friend accidently kicked my hard drive (don't ask how), and it seems to be acting up. Here's the problem: every time I try to encrypt an mp3 from a .wav file, I get this series of error messages:
> ide0: reset: success
> hda: status error: status=0x00 { }
> end_request: I/O error, dev 03:03, sector 967566
> hda: drive not ready for command
> hda: status error: status=0x00 { }
> hda: drive not ready for command
> hda: status error: status=0x00 { }
> hda: drive not ready for command
> hda: status error: status=0x00 { }
> hda: drive not ready for command
> hda: status error: status=0x00 { }
> hda: drive not ready for command
> ide0: reset: success
> hda: status error: status=0x00 { }
> hda: drive not ready for command
> hda: status error: status=0x00 { }
> hda: drive not ready for command
> hda: status error: status=0x00 { }
> hda: drive not ready for command
> hda: status error: status=0x00 { }
> hda: drive not ready for command
> ide0: reset: success

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