SATA hard drive disappears

English Hardware
1

Hi, all

I’m using openSUSE 11 and until a few days ago everything worked fine. Now I’m having problems with my SATA hard drive (a Samsung Spinpoint T166, 500 GB). It suddenly disappears, and when that happens neither Konqueror nor Yast Partitioner can see the hard drive/partitions!

But it also reappears!

Needless to say, it scares the *** out of me. Especially, because I’m completely lost with everything that has to do with hardware issues.

The SATA partitions contain a lot of data, but it not contain my \home directory; neither does it contain my , \boot, or swap partitions. So I have a fully functioning OS.

Scenario: I’m watching a movie from the sata-drive. Some noise from my computer, CPU percentage of “scsi_eh_2” increases. Sometimes I can keep watching the movie, but in somewhat regular intervals the above happens. Other times the movie hangs (and stops).

Google turned up issues with external SATA hard drive (mine is internal); while noise in regular intervals indicated a broken hard drive (I hope not; mine is only a few months old).

Searching the forum indicated some problems with the combination ASUS (which I think I have), SATA, and mixing it with older non-sata drives (PATA?). Also libata is mentioned as having some problems.

None of the issues seem to be similar enough that I’m willing to try out the solutions.

Please help!

2

1st backup your data.

Open the case, does that drive feel hotter than the rest? Use a straw/tube & listen to it, does it sound different than the others?
“Some noise from my computer” darn sure find out what is going on there;)
Just because it’s new doesn’t mean it’s not going to fail.

Have a look at /etc/fstab and see if any thing looks in error (google/linux for “fstab”; search the forum). Post your fstab & we can look at it.

What viewer are you using? is it configured?

3

I realised that, but this is my biggest drive. :slight_smile: I might be able to squeeze it onto the remaining 2. However, I don’t think that’s going to work — the drive will surely disappear while backing it up.

Nope, all 3 feel equally hot. Don’t know if that’s too hot though :slight_smile:

Thanks for the tip with the straw. The noise happened primarily when the drive disappeared, but the OS was able to find it a short while later. So I’m not sure it was the drive itself per se. I will post more about it when it happens. (I will have to reboot in a short while as the drive hasn’t reappeared yet)

Here it is (copied from fstab text file):


LABEL=Boot          /boot     ext3     noatime,acl,user_xattr 1 2
LABEL=Root          /         ext3     acl,user_xattr        1 1
LABEL=linux-swap    swap      swap     defaults              0 0
LABEL=Home          /home     ext3     noatime,acl,user_xattr 1 2
/dev/disk/by-id/scsi-SATA_Maxtor_6Y080P0_Y24DB2DE-part1       /windows/C           ntfs-3g    users,gid=users,fmask=133,dmask=022,locale=en_GB.UTF-8 0 0
/dev/disk/by-id/scsi-SATA_SAMSUNG_HD501LJS0MUJDWQ523546-part4 /windows/D           ntfs-3g    users,gid=users,fmask=133,dmask=022,locale=en_GB.UTF-8 0 0
proc                 /proc                proc       defaults              0 0
sysfs                /sys                 sysfs      noauto                0 0
debugfs              /sys/kernel/debug    debugfs    noauto                0 0
usbfs                /proc/bus/usb        usbfs      noauto                0 0
devpts               /dev/pts             devpts     mode=0620,gid=5       0 0
/dev/disk/by-id/scsi-SATA_SAMSUNG_HD501LJS0MUJDWQ523546-part1 /home/aemanuel/SATA_500GB_1 ext3       noatime,acl,user_xattr 1 2
/dev/disk/by-id/scsi-SATA_SAMSUNG_HD501LJS0MUJDWQ523546-part2 /home/aemanuel/SATA_500GB_2 ext3       noatime,acl,user_xattr 1 2
/dev/disk/by-id/scsi-SATA_SAMSUNG_HD501LJS0MUJDWQ523546-part3 /home/aemanuel/SATA_500GB_3 ext3       noatime,acl,user_xattr 1 2
/dev/disk/by-id/scsi-SATA_Maxtor_6Y080P0_Y24DB2DE-part2       /mnt/OLDroot                ext3       noatime,acl,user_xattr 1 2

Hope the line breaks are okay. Hmm, had to edit it a bit. Hope this is what you needed.

4

Well, I rebooted my computer, and my SATA drive hasn’t disappeared…yet.

It does give me the change to hear if there are any sound differences: there aren’t any! As long as the SATA drive is detectable for the OS, there are no strange noises.

I guess this means that the noise was more CPU related and the worst-case scenario — a broken hard drive — can be discarded!?

Anyway, at the moment I have been playing a movie in the background for about 15 minutes: no problems…yet.

Is there any chance this is a Bios problem?

Edit: Did I mention I intensely dislike problems that spontaneously appear and disappear. Argh!

5

Another day, and I decided to look in the system log — specifically, /var/log/warn Wow! It starts on June 27 — I assume that is the day I installed it!?

Anyway, there are a couple of error messages that keep reappearing:
(1) 2765 times the following


kernel: martian source 10.0.0.150 from 10.0.0.150, on dev eth0
kernel: ll header: 00:04:75:e3:7f:38:00:90:d0:8c:31:3e:08:00

and
(2) 1391 times the following


kernel: ata3.00: status: { DRDY ERR }
kernel: ata3.00: status: { DRDY ERR }

On July 22, the problems start. That day almost takes 50% of all warning messages, and includes the above messages, and a whole bunch of I/O errors, read errors, and so on about my SATA drive. That corresponds with my observations as a user.

I can’t post the log file. :frowning: I can’t even post the part about yesterday! Still too large! Hope this helps someone to help me :slight_smile:

6

I googled the error messages, and came up with these bug reports. I’m not sure if it is related to my problem though.

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/221677

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=444334

I also found this page about libata error messages:

Libata error messages - ata Wiki

I have no idea on how to check this stuff as I don’t know much about hardware.