[Techtalk] Unknown computer error

[David Sumbler]

I ran palimpsest (why on earth is it called that?) I was convinced that
SMART wasn't working, as suggested.  Today I got the drive replaced.

Thanks, all, for the helpful suggestions and pointers.

David


On Tue, 2015-04-28 at 23:46 -0400, R. Daneel Olivaw wrote:
> 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.
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