I've managed to reproduce the old error message with the new kernel, so I'm going to close this bug. What I've done is to run a long test using smartctl as follows:
smartctl -t long /dev/sda Then, upon having a bad block reported, with... smartctl -a /dev/sda ...producing a report like this... SMART Self-test log structure revision number 1 Num Test_Description Status Remaining LifeTime(hours) LBA_of_first_error # 1 Extended offline Completed: read failure 80% 1475 233628897 ...I've followed the "how to" found here: http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/badblockhowto.html Upon finding a file affected by this block error, I've tried to access the file using the 'file' command, and this provoked exactly the kind of error message originally reported. Western Digital support seem to think that the drive is indeed failing, so I'm sorry to have wasted anyone's time over this: I suppose that nothing was touching any affected files/blocks, and so the error just wasn't appearing. (If anyone wants, I can make a program available which automates the "how to" procedure for finding affected blocks and files, at least for ext3 filesystems.) -- Persistent SATA errors possibly indicating disk fault disappeared with new kernel https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/493819 You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Bugs, which is subscribed to Ubuntu. -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs