Input/output error at random times.

CyberMaN · 2013-07-15 05:43:00

Hi,

I am very sure this has something to do with the disk, maybe it's telling me that it's a good time to get a new one, but I wanted to ask since this is somewhat bizarre.

I set up an older machine that I had, to act as a home server for some basic tasks. Everything went fine during installation, setting up, etc. But after two hours of up time, or in this particular case, after one day of up time, the daemons on the server become unresponsive and when I log in to ssh, most of the commands result in "-bash /usr/bin/*: Input/output error" (where * is the executable I called, of course). Only basic commands like ls and pwd work, and not every time.

The only difference this time, and I just ran into this whilst writing this post, are messages like the following on the server screen when I go take a look at the machine itself:
end_request: I/O error, dev sda, sector 101821592
It's a bunch of those, different sectors.

Can I save the disk, or is it throw away time?

ewaller · 2013-07-15 05:59:01

It could be the disk, or a cable, or the cooling, or the power....
Are we talking laptop, or tower? SATA? PATA? SCSI? USB? How is the drive powered? Any "Y" cables in the power? How is the cooling in the drive bay? Is it clogged with dirt?
How many hours on the drive? Who made it?
Does it support S.M.A.R.T ? Is it the only drive on the bus?

If it is not the power or data cable, I would not trust it further than I could throw it. Even if it is a heat induced failure, I would dump it.

CyberMaN · 2013-07-15 06:08:04

Tower, SATA2, Powered by a SATA Power Cable (http://www.sierra-cables.com/Cables/Images/SATA-Power-Cable-1.jpg in case I fscked up the terminology on this), I have no idea what a Y cable is and Google doesn't seem to help me much , no dirt clogging.

It MIGHT be temperature related, but it failed at night when it is cooler here, whilst during the day when the heat here is ridiculous it came through fine, so I'm doubting that's it? But just in case, could you point me to a simple temperature monitor utility to monitor it throughout the day or something?

I don't know how many hours on the drive, it was given to me by a friend who really wasn't using it a lot (and hadn't used it in a year or so), and it is indeed the only drive in the bus. It is a Seagate ST380815AS 80GB disk and it does support SMART.

ewaller · 2013-07-15 06:17:16

A 'Y' cable is a power cable where you plug the cable into the power supply at one end, and the other end has not one, but two heads -- these are to allow you to power more drives than than power supply has outputs. Of course, with double the current, sometimes the voltage regulation suffers if the supply can't handle the double load. As to utilities, I would just install and run a S.M.A.R.T daemon. I use extra/smartmontools; when there is something wrong with the drive (including temperature) it will spam your logs.

cfr · 2013-08-02 02:02:44

Note that it spams the logs anyway e.g. it reports quite innocuous temperature changes and some alarming looking things which I hope are harmless as they've always happened to do with raw read error rates and hardware ecc recover rates.

Arch Linux

#1 2013-07-15 05:43:00

Input/output error at random times.

#2 2013-07-15 05:59:01

Re: Input/output error at random times.

#3 2013-07-15 06:08:04

Re: Input/output error at random times.

#4 2013-07-15 06:17:16

Re: Input/output error at random times.

#5 2013-08-02 02:02:44

Re: Input/output error at random times.

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