Am Montag 08 Februar 2010 01:27:59 schrieb Peter Humphrey: > Hello again List, > > $ sudo fdisk -l > > Unable to seek on /dev/sda > > What am I to make of this? The system runs ok, but apparently the > underlying disk subsystem isn't happy. This box has only the one disk at > the moment. Google doesn't help. > > The box is a new Armari system with an Asus P7P55D motherboard and a > Samsung Spinpoint F3 1TB SATA II hdd. >
Having read the thread, there are three things that come to my mind: 1) Have you tried to read from the disk at block zero, i.e. try something like dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/null bs=512 count=1024 This should read half a megabyte from the disk and for your hardisk be finsihed as soon you release the enter key ... Errors? and messages in dmsg? 2) The dmesg-output you mailed contains a call-trace about calgary. AFAIK calgary is a IOmmu. Have you tried to disable it (try something like appending iommu=none to your kernel commandline). Have you looked for a bios upgrade? maybe you can get rid of the "broken bios" messages this way. 3) A long time ago, there was a bios option for bootsector-protection, I've never tried this, and I also don't have any idea whether linux sees that in any way. If there is such an option, disable it. Greetings Alex