Help debugging DMA_READ errors

[Clint Olsen]

On Sep 16, Jeremy Chadwick wrote:
> That's very strange then.  Something definitely tried to utilise acd0 at
> that hour of the night.  What is acd0 connected to, ATA-wise?  Again, I
> assume it's PATA, but I'd like to know the primary/secondary and
> master/slave organisation, since you are using a PATA disk too.

What's the best way to give you this?  Generally with disks I try to
separate them from DVD/CD drives, so I don't think they are on the same
chain.  Is the question whether or not the DVD/CD is a slave to the PATA
disk?

acd0: CDRW <Hewlett-Packard DVD Writer 100/1.37> at ata1-master UDMA33
 
> Looks fine, although I swore ATA controllers listed their IRQs.  atapci0
> doesn't appear to have an IRQ associated with it (should be 14 or 15),
> so that's a little odd to me.  vmstat -i would help here.
 
interrupt                          total       rate
irq1: atkbd0                          14          0
irq6: fdc0                             1          0
irq12: psm0                         1624          0
irq14: ata0                       410187         14
irq15: ata1                       225418          7
irq18: uhci2+                     111881          3
irq22: skc0                       260062          9
cpu0: timer                     56551841       1999
Total                           57561028       2035

> Okay, there are some problems with your disks, but it's going to be
> impossible for me to determine if the below problems caused what you saw.
> First, ad0:

I just freed up a 300G SATA disk, so I can swap out the PATA drive if you
think it's worth the effort.

> 1) Run "smartctl -t short" on /dev/ad0 and /dev/ad4.  You can safely use
> the disks during this time.  After a few minutes (depends on how much
> disk I/O is happening; the more I/O, the longer the test takes to
> complete), you should see an entry in the SMART self-test log saying
> Completed.  Once you see that, you should run smartctl -a on the disk
> again, and see if the attributes labelled "Offline" are different than
> they were before.
> 
> 2) Consider running smartd.  I do not normally advocate this, but in
> your case, it may be the only way to see which attribute values are
> actually changing on you if/when the issue happens again.  Any time a
> value changes, it'll be logged via syslog.  You can set up smartd.conf
> to ignore certain attributes (e.g. temperature, since that has a
> tendency to fluctuate up and down a degree).
 
I'm looking at that.  The sample conf file that comes with it isn't the
easiest on the eyes, so I haven't figure out what configuration I want or
how to set it up yet.

My external hard drive is running around 50 in that small external
enclosure.  That sounds bad.

190 Airflow_Temperature_Cel 0x0022   050   043   045    Old_age   Always In_the_past 50 (Lifetime Min/Max 32/53)
194 Temperature_Celsius     0x0022   050   057   000    Old_age   Always -       50 (0 21 0 0)

> If/when this happens again, you should be able to look at your logs and
> see what counters have changed.  For example if you see something like
> Power_Cycle_Count or Stop_Start_Count increase, you have disks which are
> losing power.
> 
> Welcome to the pain of debugging disk problems.  :-)

Thanks :)

-Clint

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