> Your disk's b*ggered. Switch it off for 24 hours, then get as much off > as you can, print off the error messages, and then take it back under > warranty!
No you're on the wrong tree here (and I wish it was my box). Smartmontools doesn't find any disk errors and all disks have 0 reallocated sectors. The problem is somewhere along the IDE bus. There's a third 80GB disk in hdc, so I swapped hdb and hdc, and the problem is still on hdb whereas the previously troublesome hdb works fine as hdc. I suspect a bad interaction between hda and whatever is in hdb (unless someone has a better suggestion). Thrashing hdb read/write with dd doesn't show it but unpacking a 400MB kills it. Don't ask me why... If the problem was a bad cable or caddy, thrashing gigabytes with dd should show it. As solution I ordered a PCI IDE card to give each disk its own cable. Fingers crossed... Volker -- Volker Kuhlmann is possibly list0570 with the domain in header http://volker.dnsalias.net/ Please do not CC list postings to me.
