5.3-RELEASE: WARNING - WRITE_DMA interrupt timout - what does it mean?

[Zoltan Frombach]

Well, since I posted my original message, I investigated this a bit further. 
And according to this post 
http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-current/2004-May/027235.html this 
is not necessarily an indication of a failing hard drive... (Quote: "there 
is no harm done, but the taskqueue was slow to respond...") And I can also 
tell you that this very same hard drive *never* produced this error message 
in the past 6 months while running FreeBSD 5.2-CURRENT (from May 9, 2004). 
Thanks for the reply though. But I believe this message could simply mean 
that my "taskqueue" was slow (mean: busy) on my system with something else. 
I would really like to know what is going on, especially because this 
evening I just had another similar entry in my log file... It is still 
possible, of course, that my hard drive is indeed dying. But it can also be 
a software (driver?) issue in 5.3-RELEASE that somehow makes my "taskqueue" 
to repond slowly under some misterious cicumstances. If anyone is interested 
investigating this further please let me know. I can compile a custom kernel 
with debug symbols, etc. I'm not sure though how would that help, since it 
is just a warning message and my kernel is not dumping core...

Zoltan

On Tue, 9 Nov 2004 15:01:41 -0800, "Zoltan Frombach" <tssajo at hotmail.com>
wrote:

> I just upgraded to 5.3-RELEASE a few days ago. This morning this line got
> into my system log file:
> Nov  9 06:14:03 www kernel: ad0: WARNING - WRITE_DMA interrupt was seen
> but timeout fired LBA=2491143
>
> I've never seen this message before. Can someone please explain what it
> means? With Thanks,

Looks like you may have a hard disk about to die. I'd start doing backups if
I were you and then consider replacing the HD.

-- 
BOFH excuse #446:

Mailer-daemon is busy burning your message in hell