On Wed, 2007-01-31 at 22:20 -0600, Robert Hancock wrote: > It seems pretty unlikely that telling a hard drive to seek past its > capacity would cause it to damage itself, that would be some pretty > moronic firmware. Though, you never know - if it's true, let me know > what kind of drives these are, so I know never to buy one :-) >
Hi Robert, Yes, I'd have expected that too. I'm particularly surprised the drive-logic doesn't refuse to move the heads and just report the failure based on the LBA value. These are Maxtor drives, but its also happened with IBM drives in another system with similar configuration, as a test. During the bug-hunt (which started end of December) I built about 100 kernels trying to track down the root cause, and therefore went through many reboot cycles. Several times the drives were 'knocked out' and would refuse to initialise during POST. The only remedy was to leave the system powered down for a while - the rest seemed to do them good. The difficulty I had in debugging was the errors are generated on the work-queue and interrupt handling side, and it was extremely difficult to pin-point the root cause because the symptoms (drive seek errors) occur well after the partition tables have been scanned, and also repeat themselves several times during system start-up. TJ. - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
