Odd behaviour of the hard disk

Laertes · 2008-12-24 10:46:57

Hi,

some weeks ago my desktop hard disk started working oddly. The computer freezes while it is trying to acces the HD and then reverts from UDMA 100 to some PIO mode. In the logs I find errors like these:

ata1.00: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x0 action 0x6 frozen
ata1.00: cmd c8/00:08:bf:00:7c/00:00:00:00:00/e0 tag 0 dma 4096 in
res 40/00:00:01:4f:c2/00:00:00:00:00/00 Emask 0x4 (timeout)
ata1.00: status: { DRDY }
ata1: soft resetting link
ata1.00: configured for UDMA/100
ata1: EH complete
sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] 625142448 512-byte hardware sectors (320073 MB)
sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Write Protect is off
sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Mode Sense: 00 3a 00 00
sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Write cache: enabled, read cache: enabled, doesn't support DPO or FUA
ata1.00: limiting speed to UDMA/66:PIO4

After reading in the forums that this may be caused by the new pata drivers I tried to use the legacy ide drivers but the errors are still there:

hda: dma_timer_expiry: dma status == 0x21
hda: DMA timeout error
hda: dma timeout error: status=0x58 { DriveReady SeekComplete DataRequest }
ide: failed opcode was: unknown
hda: DMA disabled
ide0: reset: success

Besides, the file system gets corrupted and I have to repair it with fsck.

Suspecting a defective hard disk I changed it for another one but the errors still happen. I have tried also changing the ide data cable, changing it to the second IDE port and changing the power connector but with no success.

Finally, I have started suspecting the power supply and I started monitoring the lmsensors readings. The 3.3V is always on 3.3 and the 12V varies only slightly, never less than 11.8. The 5V value varies a lot, it reaches values as low as 4.3, but only in the first 5 or 10 minutes the computer is on. After that it reads 4.7-4.8 always. It seems that the erros only occur when this voltage is at values of 4.3 to 4.6. I think that the voltage range for the 5V input should be +-5%, so probably this is causing the errors.

Have you experienced any similar problems? Do you think I should change the power supply?

Thanks

R00KIE · 2008-12-24 13:20:03

Yes, you could try with another psu.
Also give a look into smartctl from the smartmontools package and issue a complete smart self-test and check if it finds anything wrong ( smartctl -l long /dev/sdx ).
If you can backup all your important data to another hd then do it.

Laertes · 2008-12-24 16:55:36

Thanks Rookie, I think I have solved it changing the PSU. Now the 5V value is most of the time 5 and sometimes 4.97 and the errors have not appeared again.

I've also made a smart complete test and it reported no errors.

Arch Linux

#1 2008-12-24 10:46:57

Odd behaviour of the hard disk

#2 2008-12-24 13:20:03

Re: Odd behaviour of the hard disk

#3 2008-12-24 16:55:36

Re: Odd behaviour of the hard disk

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