Date: Thu, 8 Nov 2007 13:29:21 -0800 From: Jeremy Chadwick <koitsu@FreeBSD.org> To: David Naylor <blackdragon@highveldmail.co.za> Cc: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Harddisk failure causes system crash, please help Message-ID: <20071108212921.GA34721@eos.sc1.parodius.com> In-Reply-To: <b53f6f940711081240q7100a08djae76b560cddfed6f@mail.gmail.com> References: <b53f6f940711081240q7100a08djae76b560cddfed6f@mail.gmail.com>
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On Thu, Nov 08, 2007 at 10:40:49PM +0200, David Naylor wrote: > I have been using this laptop for a few months now with FreeBSD without any > problems with the hard disk however today as I installed editors/vim the > system crashed (without a core dump or any message). > > When ever the system boots (and proceeds to do a fsck on ad0e (/usr)) it > also crashes without any message. I have tried the following commands: > > # dd if=/dev/ad0 of=/dev/null bs=1M ( System crashes) > > # smartctl -C -t short ( Succeeds ) > # smartctl -C -t long ( Failes with a message: ad0: FAILED - SMART timed out) Sounds like something mechanical inside of the disk is failing, or possibly the drive firmware is somewhat buggy when it comes to handling bad blocks. What brand/model of hard disk is this? atacontrol output would suffice. I'm just curious (personal interest). > I have no idea what is wrong (if the disk has corrupted should the kernel > not display error messages?). Can you please help/advise? Not necessarily, although I would expect to see a bus timeout of some kind, but it doesn't surprise me that you don't see one. If a long SMART test results in the drive timing out and falling off the bus, there's a much bigger problem at hand. There is a possibility that the system is simply going bad in some way (RAM issues or mainboard that's broken somehow), but all your problems seem to indicate issues with the disk. If I was in your shoes, I would try to get all the data off that disk, purchase a replacement, install FreeBSD on it, and restore your data. I'd then take the old/possibly-bad disk and download one of the drive fitness test utilities from the manufacturer's website. Run that and see if anything comes up / if anything bad happens. Laptop hard disks are sometimes a pain to deal with (some laptop manufacturers have BIOS tweakery where they refuse to recognise any hard disk other than ones of a specific brand/model. I haven't seen this in recent years, but it's something I've seen in the past), so I wish you luck. Laptops -- such a pain. -- | Jeremy Chadwick jdc at parodius.com | | Parodius Networking http://www.parodius.com/ | | UNIX Systems Administrator Mountain View, CA, USA | | Making life hard for others since 1977. PGP: 4BD6C0CB |
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