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To: freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject: MEDIUM ERROR and HARDWARE FAILURE messages
Date: Tue, 08 Oct 1996 19:40:03 -0700
From: Pius Fischer <pius@iago.ienet.com>
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Today I've been getting a bunch of console messages like these:

sd0(ahc0:3:0): HARDWARE FAILURE info:24e851 asc:15,1 Mechanical positioning error
, retries:4
sd0(ahc0:3:0): MEDIUM ERROR info:24e851 asc:11,0 Unrecovered read error
, retries:3

There are many more MEDIUM ERROR messages than HARDWARE FAILURE messages.
However, I haven't experienced any loss of data yet or noticed anything
else bad.

I'm running FreeBSD 2.2-960612-SNAP and I've got a Quantum Fireball 1280
with an Adaptec 2940 SCSI controller.

I checked the mailing-list archives and found some discussion about these
types of errors on -hackers from a year ago, but I'm still not sure what
to do. It was suggested to use scsi(8) to "enable the automatic remapping
of bad sectors" with something like "scsi -f /dev/rsd0a.ctl -m 1 -e -P 3".
Is this still applicable?

Is the drive going bad? Anything one can do to fix it?

Thanks very much for any help,
Pius