Date: Sat, 1 Feb 1997 14:29:17 +0100 From: j@uriah.heep.sax.de (J Wunsch) To: Don.Lewis@tsc.tdk.com (Don Lewis) Cc: freebsd-fs@freebsd.org, freebsd-scsi@freebsd.org Subject: Re: SCSI disk MEDIUM ERROR with a few twists Message-ID: <Mutt.19970201142917.j@uriah.heep.sax.de> In-Reply-To: <199702010811.AAA28411@salsa.gv.tsc.tdk.com>; from Don Lewis on Feb 1, 1997 00:11:02 -0800 References: <199702010811.AAA28411@salsa.gv.tsc.tdk.com>
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As Don Lewis wrote: (It would be fine if you could structure your report better. It's very hard to browse through, all the paragraphs were filled up with words where it's hard to figure out the essence of your problem.) > /etc/daily doesn't report this (and others don't report this) Of course. That's because buffered writes cannot report media errors to their caller. The caller has already got an OK indication about the write operation, when the device driver finally notices the write error. All the driver can do at this point is syslogging the problem. You ought to check your syslog regularly. The easiest way is to drop it onto all your logged in terminals :) (seriously, i do). > It could be the filesystem, the SCSI driver, or the drive firmware. It could be the drive itself. What MEDIUM ERRORs are these? You forgot to quote the most important thing, the driver message. > I don't know whether the SCSI code isn't reporting this to the filesystem, > or the filesystem isn't reporting this to userland code, but dump didn't > seem to see a problem, tar didn't seem to see a problem. It's interesting to know that dump didn't see the problem, since dump operates on the raw device, where error reporting is possible. Are you sure they were _unrecovered_ medium errors, i.e. the kernel didn't successfully retry them? Again, please *quote* the error messages, instead of assuming we know them. > Before replacing the drive, I decided to run the Adaptec disk verification. > It found a grand total of one bad sector and remapped it. The only > remaining damage was that fsck had deleted my newsgroups file and > history.pag had one formerly bad sector. Since the disk didn't appear > to be hopeless, I replaced the newsgroups file and rebuilt history.pag, > and things have been working flawlessly ever since. I wouldn't use that disk for serious work again. It's certainly good for storing news articles, but no longer reliable enough for storing your history database there. Also, go through SCSI reformatting it. This will cause the drive to recreate the bad sector table as necessary. You can even do this without using the adapter BIOS, there's always /sbin/scsiformat for this. I've once recovered another Seacrate drive that suffered from medium errors, and am using this until now (more than one year after those problems). However, i resorted it to a scratch drive for release testing etc., and do no longer use it for mission-critical work. -- cheers, J"org joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de -- http://www.sax.de/~joerg/ -- NIC: JW11-RIPE Never trust an operating system you don't have sources for. ;-)
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