System or file system panic on FreeBSD 5.x

[Mark Kirkwood]

pkrisada at ego.co.th wrote:
> Hi all!
> 
> Once i installed ``old'' FreeBSD 5.0-STABLE with UFS file system.
> It had been working fine for a while without any problems but sometime
> later; it showed error messages on ttyv0; each error stated
> 
>>ad1: TIMEOUT - READ_DMA retrying (2 retries left) LBA=17998815
> 
> (each error came with variant LBA value)
> I just ignored it, but these error messages were happened quite often
> after the first occurrence.
> Then the system was down to reboot without prompting, and this problem was
> still after reboot. Again and again, the last occurence of error rendered
> system unbootable.
> 
> So I switched to FreeBSD 5.4-RELEASE with UFS2 file system (fresh
> installation)
> It had been working fine for long. But yesterday I got the same error.
> It was down to reboot and the problem still persisted after reboot.
> Currently the system is still bootable, but I'm afraid that the final
> result of unbootability will happen soon.
> 
> Additional info:
> # uname -a
> FreeBSD bsdhost.localdomain 5.4-RELEASE FreeBSD 5.4-RELEASE #0: Sun May  8
> 10:21:06 UTC 2005    
> root at harlow.cse.buffalo.edu:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/GENERIC  i386
> I have 2 IDE hard disks, ad0 is used by many systems i.e. windows, linux
> 2.4.x, 2.6.x without any problems, but ad1 is only used by FreeBSD
> 5.4-RELEASE (but not dangerously dedicated)
> 
> I guess it should not be a hardware problem because fresh installation can
> fix it at least for a while.
> Any idea would be much appreciated.
> 

Looks like hardware - you could install the smartmontools port and check 
your disk to see.

Cheers

Mark