Problems with hard disk (longish)

From: Geoff Winkless (geoff-at-farmline-dot-com_at_[127.0.0.1)
Date: 02/16/04

  • Next message: Legi_at_fan: "VT82C580VP Mainboard USB-Controller Problem" 
    Date: Mon, 16 Feb 2004 10:29:25 -0000

    Hi all

    I have as my main machine a dual P-III 450 (BX board) with .5GB RAM, running
    Slackware 9.1 and a self-compiled 2.4.24 kernel. I've been using Slackware
    as a server system for about 7 years and decided to start using it as my
    desktop full-time (or as near as possible).

    I recently bought a 123GB Hitachi/IBM Deskstar (8MB cache version) and have
    partitioned it partly for the (dual-boot) Win2k (still need feurio, nothing
    else is quite good enough), 1GB of swap and the rest is FAT32 so I can write
    reliably from both systems.

    I also have (as the root drive) a 20GB Seagate (ST320423A, if that matters)
    with the Linux partitions.

    Originally I had both disks on a Promise UDMA66 controller which seemed fine
    except it would regularly produce CRC errors in the syslog: I figured this
    was A Bad Thing and looked into it - at first I thought it was cables so I
    took out the oh-so-nice round cables and replaced them with traditional flat
    (80-wire, of course) ones. This made zero difference. I shortened the cables
    in the hope that this would help further but nothing helped.

    Things started getting much worse: the machine would hang completely (mouse
    not moving in X, ctrl-alt-del not having any effect, caps-lock and
    scroll-lock lights locked on (?)).

    This happened one time and during the usual fsck (my own stupidity - I
    hadn't bothered to upgrade to ext3 as the machine isn't mission-critical or
    anything and I'd always been fine with ext2) it would lock up the machine
    again (repeatedly, and - it seemed - always at the same point).

    I interrupted the fsck and tried dd if=/dev/hdg3 of=/dev/null and the same
    thing happened.

    In the end I moved the drives off the promise controller and back onto the
    mainboard and reinstalled from scratch, and the problem went away, so I
    whipped out the controller altogether and replaced it with a (admittedly
    fairly cheap) ITEI RAID card (8212).

    The same problem still occurs.

    If I leave the Deskstar on the mainboard and put the Seagate on the ITEI
    card it all works perfectly except - obviously - that the Deskstar's running
    at a sub-optimal speed.

    I've only had one slight anomaly since I did this: I deleted a large (300MB)
    file from the FAT32 partition on the Deskstar (mounted on the onboard,
    UDMA33 controller) and the machine had a paddy for a second...

    root@gwinkless:/data/mp3/tmp# rm ../1-59840.zip
    root@gwinkless:/data/mp3/tmp# lc
    lc: .: not found
    root@gwinkless:/data/mp3/tmp# ls
    /bin/ls: .: Stale NFS file handle

    (lc is a program on the /usr partition, which is on the Seagate drive)

    However it then recovered - nothing in the syslog or messages or on the
    console.

    I think it's pretty unlikely that both the Promise and the ITEI controllers
    are faulty in a way that affects -just- the IBM drive and not the Seagate,
    and it's a bit of a coincidence that this all started going wrong when I got
    the new Deskstar. My guess is now that there's a problem with the drive
    itself, perhaps that it's incapable of the higher rates of UDMA (since the
    mainboard controller is only UDMA33). The fact that the machine would crash
    so fatally is possibly (?) down to the swap partition being on that drive,
    although I'm no kernel hacker.

    IBM's DFT says that there's nothing wrong with the drive, nothing in the
    SMART log or anything. On the other hand it (DFT) won't run the tests with
    the drive mounted on the ITEI card. I might try it on the Promise, but if
    that still says all's fine I expect I'll have serious trouble getting the
    drive replaced.

    So the question is: is there anything obvious I've missed? And if not, is
    this (drive not running on higher UDMA rates) a problem people have come
    across with these Deskstars? I had misgivings before buying but had read
    enough people state that the problems of 18 months ago were history.

    Thanks

    Oh, I'm on Ext3 now, before anyone has a go :)

    Geoff

  • Next message: Legi_at_fan: "VT82C580VP Mainboard USB-Controller Problem"

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      ... > Originally I had both disks on a Promise UDMA66 controller which seemed fine ... > In the end I moved the drives off the promise controller and back onto the ... > If I leave the Deskstar on the mainboard and put the Seagate on the ITEI ...
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