Kernel panic -supervisor read, page not present

[Vulpes Velox]

On Sun, 18 May 2003 13:47:09 -0700
Doug Hardie <bc979 at lafn.org> wrote:

> 
> On Sunday, May 18, 2003, at 09:34 US/Pacific, Doug Hardie wrote:
> 
> > I have a system that is almost a year old.  It started rebooting last 
> > week several times each day with the message "supervisor read, page 
> > not present".   A search of the archives indicates this is most likely 
> > a hardware failure, but there is no indication of what might have 
> > failed.  The only messages preceeding the panic have been a gzip that 
> > failed, several crons and atruns that failed.  Most of the panics show 
> > nothing unusual preceeding them in console.log or messages.  The 
> > machine is an archive server.  Its role in life is to do an rsync 
> > every 5 minutes for off-site archival storage.  Nothing else is 
> > running on it.  Any ideas how to determine the failure as its still 
> > under warrantee for a few more weeks.
> 
> The situation is deteriating.  Now rsync is core dumping.  ls works, 
> but ls -l does not.  It also core dumps.  The problem occurs when 
> reading /etc/spwd.db.  Something must be corrupt in it.  I can't find 
> any info on that file.

Sounds like the HD may be going. What I would do is find a cable that is known to be good and test it in another machine. If the problems persist it is the harddrive, most likely.