From owner-freebsd-questions Thu Mar 29 20: 5:23 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from xena.gsicomp.on.ca (cr677933-a.ktchnr1.on.wave.home.com [24.43.230.149]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id DC65737B71E for ; Thu, 29 Mar 2001 20:05:19 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from matt@gsicomp.on.ca) Received: from hermes (hermes.gsicomp.on.ca [192.168.0.18]) by xena.gsicomp.on.ca (8.11.1/8.11.3) with SMTP id f2U43V521182; Thu, 29 Mar 2001 23:03:31 -0500 (EST) (envelope-from matt@gsicomp.on.ca) Message-ID: <003401c0b8ce$886e7d10$1200a8c0@gsicomp.on.ca> From: "Matthew Emmerton" To: "Hal Weaver" Cc: References: <3AC3A738.B73B0404@pinetel.com> <00d401c0b897$a88f25e0$0204a8c0@dfgh> <003501c0b89b$786a06b0$1200a8c0@gsicomp.on.ca> <3AC3FC42.9931CB96@pinetel.com> Subject: Re: Slow, noisey hard drive activity Date: Thu, 29 Mar 2001 23:04:35 -0500 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Priority: 3 X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 5.50.4133.2400 X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V5.50.4133.2400 Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG > Matt, I don't get the ticking or the sluggish access with FreeBSD on the > 1.2G hard drive where FreeBSD uses the whole drive. Nor do these > symptoms occur on the 5G hard drive when I use the Win98 or the Native > Oberon operating systems, or when I had Slackware 7.1 or SuSE 6.3 > installed on the *nix partition. The problem seems unique to the > FreeBSD installation on the *nix partition. Well, it could be that you've got a bad sector on the FreeBSD portion of the drive, which is causing the drive to reset and reread the bad sector. Depending on the drive mechanics, this could make a ticking sound as the heads park themselves (well, maybe not park in the 80s hard drive sense, but at least move off of the writeable surface) while the drive resets, and then seek back to the bad location. I don't know if FreeBSD has any native tools to check for such errors and mark them (a la DOS's scandisk), and since I'm guessing that these drives are ATA, you can't use the controllers' "scan media for defects" option like you can for SCSI drives. -- Matt Emmerton To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message