[TriLUG] Hard drive DMA failures: hardware or something else?

[Andrew Perrin]

Greetings-

I keep getting the following on my laptop's kernel log:


kernel:
kernel: ide: failed opcode was: unknown
kernel: hda: drive not ready for command
kernel: hda: status error: status=0x58 { DriveReady SeekComplete DataRequest}

then sometimes there's

kernel: ide0: reset: success




This is a relatievly new Sharp Actius MM10; the drive is a Toshiba
MK1503GAL. Kernel is 2.6.12, custom compiled. The error hasn't come up
before today, but it does seem to cause problems in the form of system
hangs. Turning DMA off (hdparm -d 0 /dev/hda) just makes the text of the
messages different, doesn't change the outcome.

I'm guessing this is hardware, and I shoudl go buy a new hard drive. But
if anyone wants to tell me otherwise, I'm more than ahppy to hear it.

Thanks,
Andy

----------------------------------------------------------------------
Andrew J Perrin - http://www.unc.edu/~aperrin
Assistant Professor of Sociology, U of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
clists at perrin.socsci.unc.edu * andrew_perrin (at) unc.edu