From owner-freebsd-questions Wed Mar 7 3:14:28 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from ns1.hutchtel.net (ns1.hutchtel.net [206.9.112.100]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 79CB437B719 for ; Wed, 7 Mar 2001 03:14:23 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from jpaetzel@hutchtel.net) Received: from mark9 (hutch-749.hutchtel.net [206.10.71.49]) by ns1.hutchtel.net (8.9.1/8.9.0) with SMTP id FAA17466; Wed, 7 Mar 2001 05:14:10 -0600 (CST) Message-ID: <006601c0a7c0$eaba2100$6100000a@vladsempire.net> From: "Josh Paetzel" To: , References: <200103061759.MAA02918@eagle.freespace.net> Subject: Re: Hard drive wierdness Date: Thu, 8 Mar 2001 05:13:46 -0600 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Priority: 3 X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 5.50.4133.2400 X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V5.50.4133.2400 Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG ----- Original Message ----- From: To: Sent: Tuesday, March 06, 2001 11:59 AM Subject: Hard drive wierdness > I'm hoping someone can give us some help on an unusual problem. > > Our main server has been running freebsd 3.4 stable for about a year without > incident. The problem may have started a few days before Christmas, in that we > had a problem with our server which resulted in it crashing every time I tried > to read my mail. We ended up deleting my inbox, and this appeared to solve the > problem. We assumed that I had something corrupt in my mailbox that was > causing the problem. > > A week later, we started getting seekdone errors, which seemed to indicate a > hard drive failure. We swapped over to a backup drive, were able to retrieve > the files from the bad drive with a little work, and replaced the backup drive > with a new drive. > > About a week later, we once again got the seekdone errors, so we got a > completely new set of hard drives. We did a new build of freebsd3.4 on each > drive, then copied over mail, websites, and other relevant files. Five days > later, once again we got seekdone errors which seemed to indicate a hard drive > failure. > > Thinking that maybe we had some hardware problem somewhere on the server, we > built a whole new machine from scratch. Completely new machine, and the old > machine was taken off line until we could figure out what was causing the > problem. > > So what happened yesterday? You guessed it -- hard drive failure in the middle > of a mail backup. After running for 3 weeks straight without a problem on the > new machine, we had yet another hard drive failure, with the same seekdone > errors showing up. I swapped the backup drive in and booted from that, but > when we try to retrieve anything off the original drive, we get a "magic > Number" error, and we are told that every superblock on the drive is bad. We > can't mount the drive to retrieve the last of the info from it. > > Incidently, our secondary DNS server has also been running the same version of > Freebsd without issue for the last year. (Watch it develop hard drive failures > now just because I have said that) The other servers in the office running NT > and one running an older version of freebsd also don't seem to be affected. We > ran a utility on one of the supposed "failed" drives, and it shows no faults in > the drive. > > > So, if you're still reading at this point, my questions are: > > Does anyone have a clue what could be causing this? My sanity won't take much > more... > > Anyone have any idea how we can retrieve the last of the information off this > current drive? With every superblock supposedly bad we haven't been able to > mount the file system to retrieve the info. > > Any thoughts or suggestions would be most appreciated. > > Thanks, > > Linda > > When you say that you completely rebuilt the server, did you replace the case and power suppply? If you didn't I would bet that you have a very hungry bad power supply that is snacking on your drives. Josh > > > To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org > with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message > To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message