Re: 'Hard error reading fsbn' in 5.1 but not 5.0?

Darren Pilgrim wrote:
> Just now, my 120GB western digital, immediately upon the mounting of all
> filesystems during startup, made a faint "click", then my screen filled with
> errors of the form:
> 
> ad6: hard error reading fsbn -# of -#--# error=10
> 
> That's not an exact quote, of course, since the messages scrolled by so fast I
> couldn't actually read parts of them.  Those # signs are in place of large
> numbers (most were 12-18 digits).  This was in 5.1-R, fresh install, in the
> first 15G of the disk, just after having booted into DOS to create some DOS
> partitions after the FreeBSD slice.
> 
> I booted back into 5.0, and am presently writing across the entire disk with
> this command:
> 
> fdisk -I /dev/ad6 && dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/ad6s1 bs=1m
> 
> At more than 33 minutes into it at 24+MB/sec, there have been no such errors and
> the portion of the disk that was being mounted has already been covered by
> zeros.

Darren - I've seen this before (actually, on western digital drives) a 
few times, and I'll tell you it's never good.  Each time, I thought 
"maybe it's a bug somewhere in the OS" because I could rebuild the OS on 
the drive, and the error would seem to disappear - for awhile.  Then the 
drive would get worse, and rapidly deteriorate into a door stop.

I'm not sure if it's software or not, but I would double check your 
backups and start making plans to swap the drive.

Eric




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Eric Anderson	   Systems Administrator      Centaur Technology
Attitudes are contagious, is yours worth catching?
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