Date: Sun, 24 Feb 2013 13:33:06 -0800 From: "Ronald F. Guilmette" <rfg@tristatelogic.com> To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Boot-time hard drive errors Message-ID: <1959.1361741586@server1.tristatelogic.com>
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I have a somewhat eclectic system, currently running (or at any rate, trying to run) 9.1-RELEASE. The system in question contains three drives, to wit: <WDC WD1002FAEX-00Z3A0 05.01D05> ATA-8 SATA 3.x device <ST3500320AS SD1A> ATA-8 SATA 1.x device <Hitachi HTS541010A9E680 JA0OA480> ATA-8 SATA 3.x device Previously, I had the ST3500320AS in this system, along with one other entirely different Seagate drive, i.e. one not shown in the list above. (Also, I was previously running 8.3-RELEASE and only recently updated to 9.1-RELEASE.) Since I reconfigured the system to its current state, i.e. with the set of three drives listed above, whenever I reboot the system, about 50% of the time, when the boot process gets down to the point where it would ordinarily be printing out the messages relating to ada0, ada1, etc. suddenly I start to get a massive and apparently endless stream of error messages, apparently relating to one of the drives listed above, but the stream actually alternates between two consecutive error messages, both undoubtedly related to each other. The boot process never completes, and I am just left staring at a screen that's displaying, in very rapid succession, first the one error message and then the other, and then the first one again, and then the second one again, and on and on like that. Unfortunately, the two error messages are being printed on the screen so fast (and alternating, as described above) that I cannot even read them, but I could just barely make out that they seem to relate to ada2... well, anyway, one or another of the hard drives. I do not know the proper way to rectify whatever is causing these "flaky" errors. I use the term "flaky" because, as I have said, this boot-time problem only seems to occur maybe about 50% of the time, and the rest of the time when I boot up there is no problem whatsoever. Because I am able to boot up successfully, with no problems whatsoever, a significant fraction of the time, I am inclined to think that whatever is causing the failure is not actually a hardware fault. (And by the way, the WDC drive and the Hitachi drive are both practically brand new. That doesn't prove anything, of course, but it does make me think that they are unlikely to have serious hardware faults.) I would report this problem by filing a standard PR, but as I've said above, I can't even read the error messages, because they are being printed in such rapid succession, so I'm not sure that filing a PR would be useful to anybody. I mean what would it say? That I'm getting some unspecified failure at boot time that seems to relate to the hard drives in this system? That kind of PR would clearly not be very helpful. Has anyone else ever encountered symptoms like those I have listed above, either with 9.1-RELEASE or with any other version of FreeBSD? Regards, rfg
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