Should bad hardware cause a kernel panic?

[Eugene Grosbein]

Phil Kernick wrote:
> 
> This is a serious question and not intended as a troll.
> 
> I have a dying IDE hard drive that I want to try and recover some file from -
> the problem is that with it connected to my box, both FreeBSD 4.9-RELEASE and
> 5.2-RC2 kernel panic.
> 
> This can be reliably duplicated by booting the machine with the drive not
> connected, then plugging the drive in, and...
> 
> # atacontrol reinit 1
> panic!
> 
> The real problem with this is that I can't use any tools to try and recover
> any data.  The GEOM code in 5.x is slightly more resiliant than the 4.x code,
> but both cause panics.

ata(4) is known to be buggy at least in -STABLE after PAE integration.
There is no one interested in fixing it (see also kern/57174, kern/60526).

Eugene