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Date:      Mon, 06 Oct 1997 18:24:35 +0930
From:      Mike Smith <mike@smith.net.au>
To:        Nate Williams <nate@mt.sri.com>
Cc:        hardware@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Strange error message 
Message-ID:  <199710060854.SAA01131@word.smith.net.au>
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Mon, 06 Oct 1997 00:47:54 CST." <199710060647.AAA28851@rocky.mt.sri.com> 

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> I haven't booted up my second disk in a long time in my laptop, and now
> I get this error:
> 
> wd0: interrupt timeout:
> wd0: status 50<seekdone> error 0
> wd0: interrupt timeout:
> wd0: status 50<seekdone> error 1<no_dam>

The interrupt timeout suggests that either the drive electronics have 
died, or that you have a connector problem; have you tried removing and
replugging it?

> Unfortunately, it's on my root partition, so 'dd' doesn't even work.
> Unfortunately, the disk is 'unclean', so I can't even mount it
> read-write to go find the offended disk block.  I suspectk it's trying
> to read some block on my disk that went bad, but the error recovery is
> such that once it starts to read it, it can't get past it.  Is there
> something I can do to recover, or is it time to get a new disk (I don't
> even know if I can buy one for a machine this old)?  I haven't noticed
> anything wrong on the DOS side of the disk, but it just might not have
> any bad-spots on that part of the disk.

The error above doesn't really indicate a bad sector.  It's odd though 
that the disk works under DOS, unless DOS doesn't use the interrupt for 
the disk but instead polls for status.

It's possible that the error is such that the firmware on the drive 
crashes trying to deal with it, and this is the cause of the disk 
"cycling" as you describe it.  

> Thanks for any help you can provide!

I'm mildly puzzled that the disk works at all in any other situation.  
What sort of disk is it?  You say "second" above; do you have another 
identical unit?  If you do, a board swap between the two would be an 
interesting exercise.

mike





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