From owner-freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG Thu Jan 8 00:17:33 2004 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id A709016A4CE for ; Thu, 8 Jan 2004 00:17:33 -0800 (PST) Received: from mail.rotfl.com.au (eth1779.sa.adsl.internode.on.net [150.101.235.242]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 1746243D5F for ; Thu, 8 Jan 2004 00:17:19 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from Phil@Kernick.org) Received: from undisclosed by mail.rotfl.com.au (Postfix) with ESMTP id 9A6B774B1A for ; Thu, 8 Jan 2004 18:47:17 +1030 (CST) Received: from mail.rotfl.com.au ([127.0.0.1]) by localhost (mail.rotfl.com.au [127.0.0.1]) (amavisd-new, port 10024) with LMTP id 10154-02 for ; Thu, 8 Jan 2004 18:47:15 +1030 (CST) Received: from undisclosed by mail.rotfl.com.au (Postfix) with ESMTP id 3C8CC74B19 for ; Thu, 8 Jan 2004 18:47:15 +1030 (CST) Message-ID: <3FFD120B.4030100@Kernick.org> Date: Thu, 08 Jan 2004 18:47:15 +1030 From: Phil Kernick User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.6b) Gecko/20031208 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: freebsd-stable Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Virus-Scanned: by amavisd-new at rotfl.com.au Subject: Should bad hardware cause a kernel panic? X-BeenThere: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.1 Precedence: list List-Id: Production branch of FreeBSD source code List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Thu, 08 Jan 2004 08:17:33 -0000 This is a serious question and not intended as a troll. I have a dying IDE hard drive that I want to try and recover some file from - the problem is that with it connected to my box, both FreeBSD 4.9-RELEASE and 5.2-RC2 kernel panic. This can be reliably duplicated by booting the machine with the drive not connected, then plugging the drive in, and... # atacontrol reinit 1 panic! The real problem with this is that I can't use any tools to try and recover any data. The GEOM code in 5.x is slightly more resiliant than the 4.x code, but both cause panics. On the other hand, it I boot a Knoppix Linux distro, it complains about the drive, but it *doesn't* panic, crash or otherwise misbehave. Is this caused by us not properly checking return codes that come back from the ata driver, or something more insidious? I would have thought the the expected behaviour was returning an error and not a panic, especially if the problem is detected during initialisation of the bus. Phil. -- _-_|\ Phil Kernick E-Mail: Phil@Kernick.org / \ ROTFL Enterprises Mobile: 041 61 ROTFL \_.-*_/ v Humourist, satirist, and probably a few more 'ists to boot!