Disk error messages (ad0: HARD READ ERROR blk# xxxxxx)

[Russell J. Wood]

On Mon, Jan 02, 2006 at 11:15:08PM +0000, mtang at insightbb.com wrote:
> Hi there,
> 
> On my screen, there were messages like the followings comeing up. I have to 
> reboot mutiple times to get it boot up normally. Does this mean I have to 
> replace the disk which is a relatively new disk (1-2 years)? Any simple way to 
> fix it and to avoid the time consuming task?
> 
> 
> ad0: 39205MB <Maxtor 6EXXXXX> [79656/16/63] at ata0-master WDMA2
> ad0: HARD READ ERROR blk# 131199
> ad0: HARD READ ERROR blk# 131199 status=59 error=40
> ad0: DMA problem fallback to PIO mode
> ad0: HARD READ ERROR blk# 11272319 status=59 error=40
> ad0: HARD READ ERROR blk# 11272319 status=59 error=40
> ad0: HARD READ ERROR blk# 11272319 status=59 error=40
> ad0: HARD READ ERROR blk# 131199 status=59 error=40
> ad0: HARD READ ERROR blk# 3473535 status=59 error=40
> ad0: HARD READ ERROR blk# 9240703 status=59 error=40
> ad0: HARD READ ERROR blk# 17367167 status=59 error=40
> ad0: HARD READ ERROR blk# 17760383 status=59 error=40

I suspect that you have bad sectors on your hard disk drive (and many of
them). A good tool to use is Segate's Seatools
(http://www.seagate.com/support/seatools/index.html). Just burn the
Seatools Desktop edition to CDROM and boot from it.

- Russell