Harddisk failure causes system crash, please help

[David Naylor]

On 08/11/2007, Jeremy Chadwick <koitsu at freebsd.org> wrote:
> Sounds like something mechanical inside of the disk is failing, or
> possibly the drive firmware is somewhat buggy when it comes to handling
> bad blocks.  What brand/model of hard disk is this?  atacontrol output
> would suffice.  I'm just curious (personal interest).

# atacontrol list
ATA channel 0:
    Master:  ad0 <TOSHIBA MK4025GAS/KA100A> ATA/ATAPI revision 6

> Not necessarily, although I would expect to see a bus timeout of some
> kind, but it doesn't surprise me that you don't see one.  If a long

I remember seeing a timeout of sorts once, it was while doing a dd.  I
have done further dd tests and only the one slice causes this problem:
ad0e

> SMART test results in the drive timing out and falling off the bus,
> there's a much bigger problem at hand.  There is a possibility that the
> system is simply going bad in some way (RAM issues or mainboard that's

I doubt it is RAM since I have been able to compile the kernel in RAM,
but a good suggestion.  Had a RAM problem with another computer,
failure was much more erratic...

> broken somehow), but all your problems seem to indicate issues with the
> disk.

Do you know of any test I can run using Windows (BartPE) that could
possibly diagnose the problem (or at least confirm it is not FreeBSD's
fault for rebooting and just hardware error)?

By the way, the laptop is a Acer TravelMate 2700 (with very buggy USB
controllers).

Thank you for your help.

David