Screwiness with PCI-E SATA card?

[Todd Denniston]

Jonathan Gardner wrote, On 12/15/2008 09:52 PM:
> I've got a system with two SATA connectors that I've hooked up two
> SATA drives to. I upgraded by adding a PCI-E SATA card and another,
> 500GB SATA drive.
> 
> I've got Fedora 10 running with the root partition on an LVM volume
> group on the big 500GB drive and my /home partition on an LVM VG on a
> RAID1 array of the two original drives. Things go fine for about an
> hour until the root partition begins to corrupt.
> 
> When I reboot, fsck reports that the root partition has a lot of
> errors. Running fsck manually confirms that there are a lot of errors.
> 
> smartctl doesn't report anything obvious, but I don't have a lot of
> experience with smartctl.
> 
> Does anyone have any suggestions on how to investigate this? I'm
> rather amateurish with the admin tools to diagnose problems with
> hardware.
> 
> Right now I've got my distribute setup on the two original drives
> because I can't trust the new, large drive running on the SATA card.
> 

which file system?
if ext[23] then read up on e2fsck with the following options:
e2fsck -k -c -c -f -y -C 0 -v /dev/device
Assumptions: 1) if ext3, the journal is internal. 2) bad blocks be the problem 
even on a new drive (been there got the t-shirt_S_). 3) /dev/device is not 
mounted at the time of execution.

This should force e2fsck to check for bad blocks while doing the file system 
fixes.

if you are using something else, look at the specific man your.fsck for it and 
see if it can do a badblocks check.

fall back:
badblocks -n -b 4096 -s -v -o /root/bigbadblocks.txt /dev/device
Assumptions: 1) bad blocks be the problem even on a new drive (been there got 
the t-shirt_S_). 2) /dev/device is not mounted at the time of execution.

/root/bigbadblocks.txt will contain any seriously interesting output.

man badblocks for details on the options.  The important one there is the -n 
for "Use non-destructive read-write mode."

Oh, BTW either of these will take a while...

-- 
Todd Denniston
Crane Division, Naval Surface Warfare Center (NSWC Crane)
Harnessing the Power of Technology for the Warfighter