Cheers Juan and everyone else! Turns out my SSD had an intermittent controller fault that not even a firmware update would resolve.
Had it replaced under warranty for a different model, OpenBSD installs and works great. Very thankful, if OpenBSD hadn't failed so hard upon detecting the controller error, I'd never have noticed the issue. Dell tech reckons heaps of those early Intel SATA M.2 SSDs have failed completely. It's quite likely that OpenBSD saved me a heck of a lot of data loss; needless to say I'm very impressed, this is my first time on this platform. Thanks all! Sent from ProtonMail mobile -------- Original Message -------- On Dec 29, 2018, 08:37, Juan Francisco Cantero Hurtado wrote: > On Fri, Dec 28, 2018 at 08:18:38AM +0000, Paul Swanson wrote: >> Hi, >> >> I'm currently trying to install 6.4 on a Dell Latitude E7470 laptop (Intel >> Skylake). >> >> During the whole disk (G) partitioning process, setup fails with the >> following messages: >> >> newfs: wtfs: write error on block [8352576](tel:8352576): Input / output >> error >> ahci0: attempting to idle devices >> atascsi_disk_sync_done: error >> ahci0: NCQ errored slot 14 is idle (20000000 active) >> >> Assuming that perhaps there might be a bad block on the drive (nvme ssd) >> I've run read / write bad block tests on the whole drive, but nothing showed. >> >> The drive has had a working install of Ubuntu up till now, and I've >> subsequently installed Xubuntu on it successfully. >> >> As it stands I can't proceed with the install; very sad. >> >> Any help would be appreciated. > > Install OpenBSD on a usb stick, run OpenBSD from there and use dd to > write zeroes to the disk. If the disk has bad blocks you will see > similar errors in the dmesg. You can do the same with linux. > > Sometimes bad units pass the checks of badblocks programs because these > run read-only tests by default and the flash controller lies. You only > see the bad sectors when you try to write to the disk. > > -- > Juan Francisco Cantero Hurtado http://juanfra.info
