[Techtalk] Unknown computer error

[R. Daneel Olivaw]

Hi David,

Le 2015-04-28 05:49, David Sumbler a écrit :
> On Mon, 2015-04-27 at 23:03 -0400, R. Daneel Olivaw wrote:
>> Hi David,
>>>
>>> ata 3.00: status { DRDY ERR }
>>> ata 3.00: error { UNC }
>>> ata 3.00: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x0 action 0x0
>>> ata 3.00: BMDMA stat 0x65
>>> ata 3.00: failed commadn: READ DMA EXT
>>> ata 3.00: cmd 25/00:08:68:35:55/00:00:30:00:00/e0 tag 0 dma 4096 in
>>>           res 51/40:04:6c:35:55/40:00:30:00:00/00 Emask 0x9 (media
>>> error)
>>>
> I don't understand this.  At Linda's suggestion, and in view of Rudy and
> Daniel's opinions, I booted the computer using a Ubuntu "live" disc, and
> ran fsck on my /root partition and on my /home partition.  Both reported
> "clean".
> 
> But having done a normal reboot, using the system I have just fsck-ed, I
> am still getting the reported problem every time I attempt to open a
> LibreOffice file.  Can anyone make possible sense of this?

As the already answered by rudy, the message you got is a kernel message
coming from the depth of the hard disk driver.

It says: sorry, I tried very hard to read/write the drive, but it failed
my commands.

fsck is only a way to fix errors that happen on the logical level of the
filesystem. What you are experiencing is a dying drive.

You can try 'sudo smartctl -A /dev/sda' (or whatever your drive device is).
The output will have many lines, some are very important to check:

Reallocated_Sector_Ct, Hardware_ECC_Recovered, UDMA_CRC_Error_Count and
Pending sectors.

You may boot off an ubuntu live cd/usbkey and 'sudo apt-get install
gsmartcontrol' to have a user friendly interface to smartctl.

If current value of pending sectors is more than 0, it means that your
drive is trying to reallocate some bad sectors but is failing to do so,
probably because it is out of spare blocks.

Again, I advise that you try to recover all the data you can from the
drive and trash it. Some tools (spinrite by Steve Gibson) can try to
temporarily salvage the drive to recover important data that would
already be unreadable. Else, just get rid of the drive and buy a new one.

HTH,

R. Daneel Olivaw,
The Human Robot Inside.