Messages in this thread |  | | Date | Tue, 11 Feb 1997 17:25:26 -0600 | From | Gary Vinson <> | Subject | IDE Disk Problems |
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Hello,
We are running Linux Redhat 3.0.3 (1.2.13 kernel) using Cyrix 586. We have lost one Western Digital Caviar 31600 (1.6GB) IDE drive and one WD Caviar (700MB) IDE drive. Now, when I say lost, I mean that when the system is rebooted, the disk sounds like it is physcially broke. There is a periodic clanging noise, as if one of the drive components is actually damaged. At this point, we don't get past the BIOS.
These two drives ran for approximately one month each before dieing. Prior to this, we noticed in our system messages:
kernel: hdb: read_intr: status=0x4b { DriveRead DataRequest Index Error } " " read_intr: error=0x04 { Drive Status Error} " ide0: do_ide_reset: success
Now, my question is, can (or is it remotely possible) linux be writing something out to the WD IDE drives to break the drive. The analogy being, that you can write to a video controller and cause damage to a monitor. One of our people have suggested that Linux is writing to sector 0 of the WD IDE drive.
Sorry to make this so long, but to add to this woe, we have had two other drives go bad on other Linux boxes, both running slackware with kernel of (1.2.8). These drives ran for approximately 6 months before expiring. On one, the conditions very similar to description above. The other system had a seagate ST5108A (1GB) where we did not get the clanging noise but received the "hda: read_intr ..." messages after Linux has loaded and during file check. It happened to be an inode where the first bad spot showed up. We changed out the drive and tried to format the seagate with DOS but format failed (just to see if DOS could read/write to the drive). One other piece of information. On at least two of these systems, the CPU fan was not working. These are pentium class processors and I have always heard that you can get very flaky results when these processors heat up. These WDs drives were bought at separate times so we do not suspect that we got hold of a bad batch of drives. Any informations, ideas, would be greatly appreciated.
Gary
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