Re: IDE wierdness

[Geert Uytterhoeven]

On 20 Aug 2003, Alan Cox wrote:
> On Mer, 2003-08-20 at 16:09, Larry McVoy wrote:
> > It's clear to me that I don't want to use this drive but I'm wondering if
> > there is any interest in debugging the lock up.  I've only done it on
> > 2.4.18 as shipped by redhat but I could try 2.6 or whatever you like.
> > 
> > If the concensus is that it is OK that bad hardware locks you up then I'll
> > toss the drive and move on.
> 
> Some PIO transfers are regulated by the drive and the drive can lock the
> bus forever. Newer chipsets like the SI680/3112 support watchdog
> deadlock breakers for this but we don't really support them right now.
> 
> Getting different data off a failing drive is unusual because the blocks
> are ECC'd extensively (well more than ECC'd) and have checks, could be
> the RAM/CPU going I guess.

Although it can happen. I used to see corrupted data in /etc/motd (which is
rewritten on each boot up) and random SEGVs on an embedded box. A few weeks
later the drive started to report real errors. After mapping out the bad blocks
using e2fsck -c, and replacing the files that were affected, the problem
disappeared.

Looks like ECC is not always ECC...

Gr{oetje,eeting}s,

						Geert

--
Geert Uytterhoeven -- There's lots of Linux beyond ia32 -- geert@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx

In personal conversations with technical people, I call myself a hacker. But
when I'm talking to journalists I just say "programmer" or something like that.
							    -- Linus Torvalds

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