[NBLUG/talk] mount and fsck errors

[Andrew]

micxz wrote on Sun, 16 May 2004 14:34:02 -0700:

> Hi All'
> 
> I'm trying to help my friend in debugging some file system errors he 
> started getting after the power went out!
> 
> dmesg reads:
> hda: dma_intr: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
> hda: dma_intr: error=0x40 { UncorrectableError }, LBAsect=786495, 
> sector=786432
[snip a bunch more stuff]

I've seen this myself several times after power failures or other
bad shutdowns. I Googled a lot, trying to find answers, but
couldn't find anything definitive. By far, the most common answer
was "Your hard drive must be dying." This was given most often by
people who had never seen this problem themselves. I don't
believe this answer because I've seen the same error occur with
different, very diverse hardware: young and old, fast and slow,
large and small, different motherboards and power supplies, etc.
None of these drives showed any problems until the bad shutdown.

It appears to be happening at a lower level than the filesystem,
since I've been running ext2/ext3 and your friend has Reiser. A
few times, a good fsck has brought the filesystem back to life
with apparently nothing lost. Other times, I've had to fsck it
several times, consigning numerous files to the Great Bit-Bucket
In The Sky (of course I didn't have a backup). At one point,
suspecting a few bad sectors on a disk, I partitioned off that
little area. No good. The errors would still pop up from time to
time.

I did discover one thing that I had done wrong. I had folded the
IDE ribbon cables, at least on some of the systems (maybe all --
I don't know). This is a Bad Thing, and I knew it, but apparently
I was overcome with stupidity when I installed the drives. I
haven't run up against this problem since I un-kinked the cables,
but then, I also have all my systems on UPSes to avoid sudden
shutdowns.

If anyone has a better idea of what the problem is and how to fix
it, I'd very much like to read about it.

A.