bad blocks... random death

[Iulian Musat]

Last time I installed Fedora C2 (to get a 2.6 kernel - that was about 2 
months ago) the system will froze every second day. No error messages - 
the logs were 'clean'. I had no time to experiment with it so I 
installed a RedHat9 from scratch. At least you get some errors and not 
that often.

I would say that the problem is not with RedHat9 or whatever, but with 
the 2.4.* kernel.

Since there are few of us having this problem, I think it is worth 
sharing the experience and maybe finding a solution. Most likely, many 
tried also other discussion lists.

Currently I'm running extensive tests on a machine with 8 IDE HDDs. I 
changed cables from the flat 80 wires to the round ones (I don't know 
the name for those) and forced udma2 on all HDDs.

While before I was getting errors mostly on the HDDs using udma5, now 
only one HDD produced some errors. Noticeable is that this particular 
HDD is the closest one to the power source.

I guess the problem is somehow electrical (electromagnetic 
interference???), but likely solvable by the driver.

Next week I plan to build a machine similar with this one, but this time 
using SATA HDDs. I'm curious if there will be any more errors.

I would like to thank Thierry for keeping this thread alive.

-iulian

Ed Wilts wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 13, 2004 at 11:32:45AM +0000, Thierry ITTY wrote:
> 
>>this continues discussions about bad disk blocks not really bad and redhat
>>9 dying randomly
> 
> 
> You do realize that Red Hat Linux 9 is no longer supported, right?  
>  
> 
>>we really need help to investigate this problem which causes io errors and
>>fs corruption !
> 
> 
> You may want to consider migrating to either Fedora or RHEL to get
> better support.  RHEL, of course, would be ideal, but it's not free.
> You can get into an Enterprise offering for about $85 or so with Red Hat
> Professional Workstation.  
>