Skip site navigation (1)Skip section navigation (2)
Date:      Sat, 27 Nov 1999 19:50:34 -0500
From:      Greg Lehey <grog@mojave.sitaranetworks.com>
To:        Thomas Schuerger <schuerge@wjpserver.CS.Uni-SB.DE>, freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: Harddisk problems
Message-ID:  <19991127195034.22379@mojave.sitaranetworks.com>
In-Reply-To: <199911271244.NAA18495@wjpserver.cs.uni-sb.de>; from Thomas Schuerger on Sat, Nov 27, 1999 at 01:44:31PM %2B0100
References:  <199911271244.NAA18495@wjpserver.cs.uni-sb.de>

next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
On Saturday, 27 November 1999 at 13:44:31 +0100, Thomas Schuerger wrote:
> Hi!
>
> I just bought an IBM Deskstar DPTA-372730 27.3 GB UDMA/2 drive
> for my FreeBSD 4.0-CURRENT system. However, I am having severe problems
> with the 19 GB slice I have created.
>
> I am using the ATA driver with my UDMA controller on my ASUS P2B-DS
> mainboard. The ATA driver keeps telling me there are "hard errors"
> when reading some certain sectors on the disk.
>
> fsck reports the following:
>
> CANNOT READ: BLK 18350144
> THE FOLLOWING DISK SECTORS COULD NOT BE READ: 18350191,
> CANNOT READ: BLK 38274656
> THE FOLLOWING DISK SECTORS COULD NOT BE READ: 38274713,

I'd guess that these are two bad sectors, not four, but I don't
understand the offsets: in the first case, it's 47, in the second case
57.  Could it be you have copied this incorrectly?  Are these always
the same sectors?  If so, you can be pretty sure that there really is
a problem with them.  You should also check the output in
/var/log/messages.

> I have tried formatting the whole partition with Windows and that
> worked fine.

Windows can't format hard disks.

> Then I used newfs to reinstall UFS on it (which went much too fast
> for actually formatting the disk), something like 30 seconds with
> FreeBSD compared to 20 minutes with Windows (note that using Windows
> I formatted the whole partition, whereas using FreeBSD I just
> newfs'ed the 19 GB slice).

Correct, newfs is not a format program.  I don't know what Windows was
doing; possibly it was doing a verify pass, but then it should have
found the bad sectors.

> Is there a better way to actually check the slice for errors or do a
> "format" that does a verify on the formatted data?

Possibly your BIOS will have a format utility.  Otherwise you need to
find one from the vendor; I don't know if IBM supplies one.  But if
the disk has bad sectors which aren't automatically remapped, you
should return it under warranty.

> I'd like to know whether the disk really has some hard errors on it
> or if perhaps the filesystem or ATA driver cannot handle such big
> partition.

ufs doesn't have any problems with much larger file systems; we've
seen file systems on Vinum with over 100 MB.  I don't think that this
is a problem with the driver, but again, the log messages and the
offsets will help decide whether it's a hardware problem or not.

Greg
--
When replying to this message, please copy the original recipients.
For more information, see http://www.lemis.com/questions.html
Finger grog@lemis.com for PGP public key
See complete headers for address and phone numbers


To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org
with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message




Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?19991127195034.22379>