Bad disk or kernel (ATA Driver) problem? - SOLVED

[Karl Denninger]

On Wed, Jan 19, 2005 at 03:06:04PM -0800, Jon Simola wrote:
> On a different box (Supermicro SuperServer 5013C-T, P4SCE BIOS v1.2c):
......
 
> A pair of Maxtor 80GBs, the BIOS is set for "Enhanced", up to 6 drives
> (4 IDE + 2 SATA).

....

> Crazy as though it seems, I wasn't kidding about changing the BIOS.
> The other 2 settings are "SATA only" and "Auto". When the drives
> started flaking out (timeouts on reads) I would go into the BIOS and
> cycle through the BIOS settings. After changing it once or twice,
> things would be fine for months at a time.

After swapping the "suspect" drive around in an attempt to get the failure 
to move to the other disk in the pair I actually got a failure on the OTHER 
channel (in other words, the problem followed the DISK)

That got followed up with a soak test with DOS-based diags, which eventually
spat out a hard failure code.  It took some effort, since the problem
doesn't appear on a quick test nor does it show up at the same block all
the time - indeed, the block where it finally pukes is all over the place.

Back to Maxtor it goes - it appears that FreeBSD's driver (and the bios,
etc) is not at fault here, and was indeed reporting a "real" failure.

I guess the mirroring code in 5.3-STABLE actually works :->

-- 
Karl Denninger (karl at denninger.net) Internet Consultant & Kids Rights Activist
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