On Fri, Aug 25, 2006 at 08:37:03PM +0200, Francesco Pietra wrote: > Sent again: The external scsi HD was not connected when the accident occurred > > > Hi Erik: > Thanks for your attention. > > Main board: Tyan K8WE S2895 > SATA II controllers nForce Pro 2200. > Added graphic card Pixel view 6600 256M PCI. > Added SCSI controller LSI PCI for external scsi HD (old IBM for backup). > CPU1 and CPU2: Opteron Dual Core 265. > ram: 8 x KingstonKVR 400D43a/1GB DDR2 CL3 Ecc Reg. > HD: 2 x Maxtor 6V300F0; ATA version 7; ATA standard ATA/ATAPI-7 T13 1532 D.
There appear to be problems with Nvidia Nforce chipsets with certain Maxtor drives that result in data corruption. From what I could figure out it appears to be a problem in the nforce SATA engine that show up with certain Maxtor drives, though sometimes also with other brands. Maxtor has a firmware update that works around the Nvidia bug, you might want to ask their support department. > OS: debian etch amd6a, kernel 2.6.15-1-amd64-k8-smp, filesystem ext3, grub on > boot partition, partitions for proc home tmp usr var swap, raid1 software, no > Xsystem when the accident occurred. Make sure that you don't have the proprietary Nvidia kernel module loaded for the graphics card. Because it's a proprietary module it's not properly reviewed so it might silently corrupt memory. > #smartctl -a -d ata /dev/sda (or sdb) reported PASSED (run after the accident > described above). Unable to see the result of short self test (don't know > where it is written, if at all; disks are not in database). You could try to get smartmontools from debian-unstable and see if it has support for your drives. > While I plan to replace the HD cables as soon as this computation has > attained > convergence, I wonder whether lack of a power protection unit may have been > responsible for the failure of disks. Possible, though drives usually tend to die completely when they get damaged by overvoltage. > I plan anyway to buy one; only > uncertain about the power for this machine and an Athlon k7 pc. 800VA enough? > I do not need long energy supply because calculations can be resumed from > last HD written result; perhaps one minute energy supply? APC has a nice product selector on their website, see http://www.apc.com/tools/ups_selector/ . There's good support for APC UPSes by nut, and knutclient even gives you a nice graphical monitor application (and of course nut can be monitored by nagios). Anyway, back to your problem: - Make sure you don't use the proprietary nvidia kernel module - Replace the cables - If it still persists, check Maxtor support Erik -- +-- Erik Mouw -- www.harddisk-recovery.com -- +31 70 370 12 90 -- | Lab address: Delftechpark 26, 2628 XH, Delft, The Netherlands -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
