Hi, This question probably has been discussed numerous times, but I'm somewhat unsure what really causes ATA failures..
I have pretty basic server here which has two IDE drives - each is 200GB. System is FreeBSD-5.2.1-p9 That server has been setup about 9 months ago, and just about 3 months ago my logs quickly filled up with: ad0: FAILURE - WRITE_DMA status=51<READY,DSC,ERROR> error=10<NID_NOT_FOUND> LBA=268435455 Server was still running, but I was unable to write to certain files/folders on the drive - whenever I tried to access $HOME/.fetchmailrc, for example, it wouldn't read/write the file and system would fire up a message similar to above. After couple reboots, I started getting more and more of these, and server was unusable, so I had to shut down all services and mount drives read only to backup data from the drives.. At first, I thought, this could be related to poor cooling of the parts, so drives could easily overheat in the long run. After successful backup, I purchased two new drives, with two aluminum drive fans. New drives' models were identical to the old ones - ad0 <ST3200822A/3.01> ATA/ATAPI rev 6 which is Seagate's 200GB drive. I reloaded OS on the new drives, then restored all data from the old drives. All seemed to be fine for 2 months now... but today I woke up, and noticed these messages again. So now the whole situation leads me to a question - is there some issues with the ATA driver/system [or filesystem?] on FreeBSD-5.2.1? What can I do to stop these frequent failures? How do I diagnose the drives (and see whether it is really a hardware issue or something else) remotely (I don't have local access to the server - it is sitting overseas)? It seems to me that if I continue running system as now, I will have these failed drives every 1-2 months! It does not sound like a normal situation. I am running FreeBSD-5.2.1-p9, filesystem is UFS2, and all partitions [except for /] have softupdates "on". Kernel is built on GENERIC, with only added ipfw options. regards, M. _______________________________________________ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hackers To unsubscribe, send any mail to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]"