ATA_DMA errors

[Rich Wales]

I had a READ_DMA timeout situation which I'm pretty sure was
related to a drive problem.

I'm running 5.3-RELEASE-p5 on an older machine (333 MHz AMD
K6).  The 20 GB hard drive in this system periodically, but
only occasionally, gave READ_DMA timeout errors.  These errors
sometimes cited identical block (LBA) numbers from one time to
the next.

I tried running the system with the case open, in case it was
an overheating problem, but this had no effect.  I considered
replacing the power supply, but I never got around to doing
this.

Finally, about a week ago, I copied the entire system to a
new hard drive.  So far, I haven't had even one READ_DMA error
since going to the new hard drive.

At least in this one case, it seems fairly certain that the
problem has something to do with a particular hard drive.

Curiously, I did =not= get any READ_DMA errors while I was
making a full backup of the old drive in preparation for
copying the data onto the new drive.

Rich Wales            richw at richw.org            http://www.richw.org