failing disk, or not?

[Bill Hacker]

Matthew Dillon wrote:
:I'm seeing some disk errors in dfly that I cannot reproduce with other
:OS checking the partition:
:
:ad4: UDMA ICRC error writing fsbn 249842603 of 110387664-110387679 (ad4 bn 249842603; cn 15551 tn 250 sn 38) retrying
:ad4: UDMA ICRC error writing fsbn 249842603 of 110387664-110387679 (ad4 bn 249842603; cn 15551 tn 250 sn 38) retrying
:ad4: UDMA ICRC error writing fsbn 249842603 of 110387664-110387679 (ad4 bn 249842603; cn 15551 tn 250 sn 38) retrying
:ad4: UDMA ICRC error writing fsbn 488278315 of 229605520-229605535 (ad4 bn 488278315; cn 30393 tn 234 sn 28) retrying
:ad4: UDMA ICRC error writing fsbn 488278315 of 229605520-229605535 (ad4 bn 488278315; cn 30393 tn 234 sn 28) retrying
:ad4: UDMA ICRC error writing fsbn 488278443 of 229605584-229605599 (ad4 bn 488278443; cn 30393 tn 236 sn 30) retrying
    This doesn't sound like a disk failure to me.  It sounds like a driver
    problem.
:atapci1: <Generic PCI ATA controller> port 0xec00-0xec7f,0xeb00-0xeb0f,0xb70-0xb73,0x970-0x977,0xbf0-0xbf3,0x9f0-0x9f7 irq 11 at device 10.0 on pci0
:ad4: DMA limited to UDMA33, non-ATA66 cable or device
:ad4: 190782MB <ST3200822AS> [387621/16/63] at ata2-master BIOSDMA
    That's not good.  It can't identify the controller.  It's amazing that
    it works at all.
    Could you run pciconf -l?

:A bit of history, I did have a system lockup -- I could switch virtural
:terminals but no keyboard input was accepted -- a week or two ago,
:didn't file bug because I was half-hazard experimenting (in user space)
:and couldn't explain well enough, at the time all I was doing, now I
:don't even remember. A fsck was required, and with a 95Gb /usr, that
:took quite a while. (welcome comments on why softupdates didn't help
:here), also the /usr partition was near or over 100% capacity, but I
:never got disk full errors, ie didn't *completely* run out of space.
:
:At this point can I be sure my disk is failing or could there be some
:driver instability? The full dmesg is below.
:
:Don't see it in dmesg, but ad4 is a 200Gb Seagate drive, on a nvidia
:sata controler.  Disk Product Number ST3200822AS, Part Number 9W2854-301
:
:Thanks,
:// George
    Update to the latest, just in case recent big fixes might have
    something to do with the lockup you experienced. 

    Softupdates does not prevent fsck from running.  We don't have a
    solution at the moment.  FreeBSD has implemented a background
    fsck but I just don't like that solution.
   
					-Matt
JMNSHO, but a 'background' fsck is like boarding
a train that hasn't yet arrived.
. ... Leaves one standing on the tracks!

Not a good place to be .... ;-)

Bill