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.)
