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Date:      Sat, 10 Apr 2004 14:22:16 +0200 (CEST)
From:      "Julien Gabel" <jpeg@thilelli.net>
To:        freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
Subject:   Can't *write* to a hard disk, not even a slice using fdisk(8).
Message-ID:  <50127.192.168.0.105.1081599736.squirrel@webmail.thilelli.net>

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Hello,

Here is my problem. I had a hard disk for one year now, working together
with an other identical disk in a _hard_ mirror. One month ago, I noticed
the mirror was not active, found that the second part of the mirror was
not responding and decided to recreate completely the mirror after making
some fresh backup (from the valid part of the RAID-1).

Te newly created mirror seems to work fine until yesterday, when I need
to reboot the system... and the mirror was not responding for a second
time. But this time it was not possible to create a new fs on the recreated
mirror as I did before. For the moment, the system works great on a single
disk.

But the fact that the BIOS and FreeBSD sees the "faulting" disk without
problem makes me in doubt. I can't see any error from the OS point of view
(nor in syslog nor in console) but now I can't even _partition_ it with
fdisk(8), saying that "Operation not permitted"!

- My OS release is FreeBSD 5.2.1-RELEASE-p4.

- The disk is a 120Go/8Mo from Maxtor (UDMA133).

- What dmesg(8) says about it:
  # grep ad10 /var/run/dmesg.boot
  GEOM: create disk ad10 dp=0xc6ab2660
  ad10: 117246MB <Maxtor 6Y120P0> [238216/16/63] at ata5-master UDMA133

- But when I tried to create a slice on it, I get:
  # fdisk -BI ad10
  ******* Working on device /dev/ad10 *******
  fdisk: can't write fdisk partition table: Operation not permitted

1/ How can I be certain that the hard disk is dead (even if it seems
   not to be)?
2/ Is there someting I can do to test/repair it?
3/ Anything else to say to diagnose my problem?

Thanks in advance,
-- 
-jpeg.



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