Le jeudi 02 octobre 2008 à 20:17 +0200, Wolfgang Pfeiffer a écrit : > Could this also be a simple file system damage?
Errors like that (i.e. in the middle of a DMA interrupt) are not simple FS damage, I am pretty sure. > I was hoping it was just something like that, because this hopefully > could be "fixed" with a reinstall, and with a previous low-level > formatting like > > dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/hda (not being sure whether the syntax is > correct .. ) For this kind of low level formatting, I would advise you to dd from /dev/zero, as the hard drive controller can try to replace bad sectors if needed when it sees that an all-0 block is written. But when some sectors begin to fail, others will soon come, in general. > Oh, and the Fedora smartctrl found (surprise, surprise .. :) a failure on > LBA 76724676 and 76724678, too (please see the old log above) ... Well, this confirm that the error lies in hardware, not in the file system itself. > I attach the log made on the broken machine via > smartctrl -a /dev/hda So, the very high numbers like Raw_Read_Error_Rate and Seek_Error_Rate are meaningless, I think, but the numbers in Offline_Uncorrectable and UDMA_CRC_Error_Count show that some sectors have already been lost. But what worries me most is the Load_Cycle_Count value : 2898441 is far too high for a disk, but may look real, as your disk as been spinning for quite some time (10000+ hours). This roughly corresponds to a load/unload every 15s : do you here some light "tic tac" sound from your disk every 15s or so ? For reference, mine, which has a 8000+ hours lifetime, has a count of 268656 (ten times less ...). If you take the specs from seagate for your hard drive ( http://www.seagate.com/docs/pdf/datasheet/disc/ds_momentus5400.2_120gb.pdf ), you'll see it's made for at most 600000 load/unload cycles. I am worried about it because this is what I saw from a lot of apple laptops, and as you may have understood, from one of my lost iBook's hard drive. This made the news some time ago, not especially for apple's disks, but when Ubuntu was said to be killing hard drives : some vendor BIOSes did not set the power saving mode of the hard drive "correctly", which led them to load/unload too often, and kill the hard drive in a very short time. AFAIK, OpenFirmware does not set any power saving mode at all, and neither does OSX, and by default a lot of disk are in a "maximum" power saving mode, which unloads the hard drive head very often, thus consuming less energy but shortening the life of the hard drive. For some years, I've been seeing a lot (4 from my eyes, more from internet forums) of apple laptops fail after a bit more than a year (mostly on "low end" laptops, like the iBook, whose hard drive is made to bear no more than 300000 load/unload cycles). Most of them were not using Linux, just OSX. I don't know if this information should be louder spoken, because I wasn't able to verify that on failing laptops I didn't handle but heard to be failing quite soon in their life. But this is, I think, one of the main reason hard drives seem so fragile today, as the autopsy shows that the number of load/unload cycles really exceeded what the vendor says, and as a lot of vendors want their laptop to save energy, they set aggressive settings to gain some battery life. You can change these settings with the -B option of hdparm, for example : hdparm -B254 /dev/hda disables power management on most hard drive (the value is drive dependant, most of the time 255 or 254 disables power savings). I think this is what is done in laptop-mode package when you set your hard drive in "no PM" mode. > > What do you mean by "see hda7" ? > > to "see" in the sense of to "detect" ... > mac-fdisk detected the damaged partition in the Debian installer, IIRC > .. What I meant is that, if you can "see" some partition in mac-fdisk, you can see them all. But this doesn't mean the FS on them is not failing. When you said you didn't see hda7 but you did with the others, it sounded strange to me. > No, not that easily .. It's a Powerbook5,8: if I manage to remove the > disk from it (there must be instructions somewhere on www) I'll > reinstall a new one. No time to waste, because my old tibook, where > I'm typing this email, is making strange noises already. Looks like > I'm in need of quick decisions, besides working hardware ... :) Well, the instructions from macfixit are good, I already disassembled a 12" iBook and a 15" PB with them. And it looks like you will need them soon ... > > BTW, how old is your powerbook ? > > a little more than 2.5 years. Still with the same disk installed that was > shipped with the machine .. My iBook lasted a bit more than a year, with an hard drive spec'ed for half the load/unload cycle count ... make up your mind. Begards, benjamin -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]