Harddisks DMA errors

[Guido Demmenie]

Hello,

After having problems with DMA errors on my old PATA 200GB disks  
because of a faulty harddisk, I switched to SATA 500GB disks. I used  
fdisk to create slices and newfs them, then copied everything using  
dump & restore to my new harddisks.

Now I have problems running into the next error for both my harddiscs:

----------------
ad4: WARNING - READ_DMA UDMA ICRC error (retrying request) LBA=268435454
ad4: WARNING - SETFEATURES SET TRANSER MODE taskqueue timeout -  
completing request directly
ad4: WARNING - SETFEATURES SET TRANSER MODE taskqueue timeout -  
completing request directly
ad4: WARNING - SETFEATURES SET RCHACHE MODE taskqueue timeout -  
completing request directly
ad4: WARNING - SETFEATURES SET WCHACHE MODE taskqueue timeout -  
completing request directly
ad4: WARNING - SET_MULTI taskqueue timeout - completing request directly
ad4: TIMEOUT - READ_DMA retrying (0 retries left) LBA=268435454
ad4: FAILURE = READ_DMA  
status=ff<BUSY,READY,DMA_READY,DSC,DRQ,CORRECTABLE,INDEX,ERROR>  
error 
= 
ff 
< 
ICRC 
,UNCORRECTABLE 
,MEDIA_CHANGED 
,NID_NOT_FOUND,MEDIA_CHANGE_REQUEST,ABORTED,NO_MEDIA,ILLEGAL_LENGTH>  
LBA=268435454
----------------

I am able to reproduce this error at will if I issue the following  
command:
# dd if=/dev/ad4 of=/dev/null bs=1024

What surprises me is that it the following information is provided by  
dd:

----------------
dd: /dev/ad4: Input/output error
134217727+0 records in
134217727+0 records out
137438952448 bytes transferred in 9732.012957 secs (14122356 bytes/sec)
----------------

This number of _bytes transfered_ looks an awful lot like 137 GB which  
normal LBA can handle. And it probably isn't coincidence that "normal"  
LBA can only handle 268435455 locations. Large LBA should work better  
I suppose.

Problem is that I have used fdisk to newfs and slice my disk and they  
were fully accessible then. My Promise SATA300 TX2Plus does have  
support for LargeLBA so there again it should work.
I'm quite sure the disks aren't faulty because I get the problem on  
both disks and the errors are exactly the same.
I'm not sure what the SETFEATURE error has to do with this all, maybe  
someone can explain.

So it ends up in two questions:
1. How do I get those drives working?
2. If it is of relevance what does that SETFEATURES warning mean?

Anyone that can help me?

--
Guido

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