Dead disk? READ_DMA Failure

[Erik Nørgaard]

Hi,

Please read on although this is a long one... I might panic and
coredump myself if I don't get this fixed.

I have a one year old Hitachi Travelstar 60GB/4200RPM disk. This
night and since then, I get these errors:

ad0: TIMEOUT - READ_DMA retrying (2 retries left) LBA=48926527
ad0: TIMEOUT - READ_DMA retrying (1 retry left) LBA=48926527
ad0: FAILURE - READ_DMA timed out

or

ad0: TIMEOUT - READ_DMA retrying (2 retries left) LBA=50299455
ad0: FAILURE - READ_DMA status=51<READY,DSC,ERROR>
    error=40<UNCORRECTABLE> LBA=50299455

The LBA number varies, but otherwise it is consistent. Eventually
the device is removed from /dev and no disk is accessible,
although mount shows mounted devices.

I have booted in single user mode and run fsck manually multiple
times to correct all found errors, most errors are on /, /usr and
some on /var, yet the problem reappears.

I have tried to reinstall, toggling newfs to recreate /, /usr and
/var hoping that any bad blocks or sectors would be removed or
marked unusable. But the problem remains.

Is there a way I can reformat or fix the disk so that broken areas
will not be used again?

Please, how far from the grave are my data?

Any suggestion on which new drive to choose? I have looked at
Western Digital Scorpio WD600VE 60 GB.

Given the mentioned error, does this indicate an error that would
be covered by standard guarantee? after all the disk is just one
year old...

The system: FreeBSD 5.4, Epia Mini-ITX CL1000, 256MB RAM, 60 GB
HDD.

Thanks, Erik

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