Hi all, I'm maintaining a computer running Ubuntu 10.04LTS for my grandfather. The computer's just over a year old, and hasn't had any trouble until a couple of days ago when my grandfather told me it wouldn't boot.
So, checking it out... The first time I tried to start it up, it seemed to hang just after loading grub (...black screen apart from a flashing cursor at top left). The hard drive light was not active at all. Minutes passed. Nothing happened. The second time, Ubuntu started up - but slowly (say, five minutes from power-on to gdm). Once running all seemed fine - except for the following messages in /var/log/messages: May 30 23:51:09 hobart kernel: [ 340.299182] sr 1:0:0:0: CDB: Test Unit Ready: 00 00 00 00 00 00 May 30 23:51:09 hobart kernel: [ 340.309401] ata2: soft resetting link May 30 23:51:10 hobart kernel: [ 340.488255] ata2.00: configured for UDMA/66 May 30 23:51:10 hobart kernel: [ 340.756317] ata2.00: TEST_UNIT_READY failed (err_mask=0x2) May 30 23:51:15 hobart kernel: [ 345.464026] ata2: soft resetting link May 30 23:51:15 hobart kernel: [ 345.644250] ata2.00: configured for UDMA/66 May 30 23:51:17 hobart kernel: [ 348.000352] ata2.00: TEST_UNIT_READY failed (err_mask=0x2) May 30 23:51:17 hobart kernel: [ 348.000359] ata2.00: limiting speed to UDMA/66:PIO3 May 30 23:51:20 hobart kernel: [ 350.620020] ata2: soft resetting link May 30 23:51:25 hobart kernel: [ 355.776150] ata2.00: qc timeout (cmd 0xa1) May 30 23:51:25 hobart kernel: [ 355.776159] ata2.00: failed to IDENTIFY (I/O error, err_mask=0x4) May 30 23:51:25 hobart kernel: [ 355.779671] ata2.00: disabled May 30 23:51:30 hobart kernel: [ 360.816022] ata2: link is slow to respond, please be patient (ready=0) May 30 23:51:35 hobart kernel: [ 365.800022] ata2: device not ready (errno=-16), forcing hardreset May 30 23:51:35 hobart kernel: [ 365.800032] ata2: soft resetting link May 30 23:51:35 hobart kernel: [ 365.956188] ata2: EH complete That sequence of messages repeated over and over. The third time I rebooted, all was fine, the OS loaded as quickly as ever, and there was nothing weird being written to /var/log/messages. What I've tried: Via Ubuntu's "Disk Utility", I've tried the "SMART" self tests on the dodgy drive. It found nothing wrong and calls the drive "healthy". I've run memtest86+ for 24 hours, and the computer's memory (2Gb) seems fine. The drive seems to be behaving itself now, but I'm not sure I trust it. What you you think? Is this what happens when a hard drive begins to fail? (We do have daily backups on an external drive, so I'm not tooo worried about disaster at this point.) -- Tim Musson http://homepages.ihug.co.nz/~trmusson/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/timothymnz/ _______________________________________________ Linux-users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.canterbury.ac.nz/mailman/listinfo/linux-users
