YAHDF (Yet Another Hard Drive Failure?)

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Tue, Mar 05, 2013 at 03:12:04PM -0500, Peter King wrote:
> I have a sinking feeling I know the answer to this, but just in case...
> 
> Yes, bash is slow/unresponsive; a reboot yielded the message that there
> were file system errors; and my logfiles have the following messages
> repeated (with minor variations) literally hundreds of times:
> 
> Mar  4 03:10:04 amber kernel: [477226.826516] ata3.00: configured for UDMA/133
> Mar  4 03:10:04 amber kernel: [477226.833553] ata3.01: configured for UDMA/133
> Mar  4 03:10:04 amber kernel: [477226.833567] sd 2:0:0:0: [sda] Unhandled sense code
> Mar  4 03:10:04 amber kernel: [477226.833570] sd 2:0:0:0: [sda]  
> Mar  4 03:10:04 amber kernel: [477226.833572] Result: hostbyte=DID_OK driverbyte=DRIVER_SENSE
> Mar  4 03:10:04 amber kernel: [477226.833575] sd 2:0:0:0: [sda]  
> Mar  4 03:10:04 amber kernel: [477226.833577] Sense Key : Medium Error [current] [descriptor]
> Mar  4 03:10:04 amber kernel: [477226.833581] Descriptor sense data with sense descriptors (in hex):
> Mar  4 03:10:04 amber kernel: [477226.833582]         72 03 11 04 00 00 00 0c 00 0a 80 00 00 00 00 00 
> Mar  4 03:10:04 amber kernel: [477226.833591]         42 39 23 4f 
> Mar  4 03:10:04 amber kernel: [477226.833595] sd 2:0:0:0: [sda]  
> Mar  4 03:10:04 amber kernel: [477226.833599] Add. Sense: Unrecovered read error - auto reallocate failed
> Mar  4 03:10:04 amber kernel: [477226.833602] sd 2:0:0:0: [sda] CDB: 
> Mar  4 03:10:04 amber kernel: [477226.833603] Read(10): 28 00 42 39 23 4e 00 00 08 00
> Mar  4 03:10:04 amber kernel: [477226.833623] ata3: EH complete
> 
> 
> Looks like yet another hard disk failure. But perhaps I'm missing something?
> Any advice/suggestions welcome.

Looks like a failing disk.  I hope you have backups.

> The hard drive at issue is, naturally, the one containing /boot and /. It's
> a Western Digital Caviar Black 1TB drive, perhaps a couple years old. Right
> now I think I'll replace it with an SSD, but again, any advice/suggestions
> welcome.

I put raid1 minimum in every machine I build.  Disks will fail.

Laptops are a problem though since raid is usually not an option there.

-- 
Len Sorensen
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