Matty wrote: > On Wed, 24 Aug 2005, Stuart Henderson wrote: > >> --On 24 August 2005 10:37 +0200, Ramiro Aceves wrote: >> >>> pciide0:0:1: bus-master DMA error: missing interrupt, status=0x61 >>> wd1a: device timeout reading fsbn 1489200 of 1489200-1489203 (wd1 bn >>> 1489263; cn 1477 tn 7 sn 6), retrying >>> wd1: soft error (corrected) >>> wd1(pciide0:0:1): timeout >>> type: ata >>> c_bcount: 2048 >>> c_skip: 0 >>> pciide0:0:1: bus-master DMA error: missing interrupt, status=0x61 >>> wd1a: device timeout reading fsbn 1486176 of 1486176-1486179 (wd1 bn >>> 1486239; cn 1474 tn 7 sn 6), retrying >>> wd1: soft error (corrected) >> >> [etc] >> >> All hard drives have bad blocks, most hard drives now have some spare >> capacity. As the drive detects bad or failing blocks, the spare blocks >> are automatically remapped over the bad blocks. This is internal to >> the drive - by the time you start noticing drive errors, the drive is >> usually unable to remap any more blocks. > > > smartmontools does a great job of notifying you prior to this occurring. > When you startup smartd to alert when S.M.A.R.T attributes change, you > can watch the drive slowly die over time. smartmontools is part of the > OpenBSD > ports tree in case you interested in giving it a spin. > >> >> Sometimes the manufacturer's drive-test tools can be useful >> (Hitachi/IBM's DFT can do some basic tests on drives from other >> manufacturers too). There's also a commercial program Spinrite which >> claims to have good stress-tests. > > >
Hello all, First, I want to thank everyone who helped me with this weird issue. Matty, thanks for you info, but this is a 10 year old disk, and does not support the SMART facility. :-( I have been doing some tests. I removed the drive, and placed it on a older Pentium 133 MHz machine (of course changed master/slave settings). I installed OpenBSD there, played a lot with the drive until I filled it with plenty of files, ran fsck and the result was that there were not errors. Everything was just fine. I moved the drive back to the "modern" AMD 1200 MHz athlon, and after the same hard disk marathon, ran fsck, there were not errors!!. I have concluded that: - Thre was a bad cable connection. Unplugging and plugging the cable again fixed the problem. - I have done this tests with the box _opened_. Perhaps there are some heating problems in the disk that I am going to investigate further (this disk is in the middle of the main disk and the floppy drive, so I guess it gets hot. - I have not wait enough time for the problem to occur. Many thanks to all. I will keep you informed in case the issues come again. Ramiro. EA1ABZ.
