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Date: Sun, 22 Jul 2007 14:43:02 +0100
From: Bruce M Simpson <bms@incunabulum.net>
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Subject: Help! My laptop drive may be dying.
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Hi,

My laptop drive might be dying. It is a Samsung MP0804H which I have 
used for around 28 months without issue.

Every now and then it will click and sound as though it is thermally 
recalibrating itself.

I ran SMART diagnostics from smartmontools, and Samsung's own diag tools 
which all report the drive is OK (a full captive surface test). I see 
nothing untoward in the SMART info pages.

Whilst Windows is able to tolerate the retrying of ATA commands which 
this click appears to be inducing, FreeBSD can easily get sick and just 
hang, which majorly gets in the way of real work.

I am always running X without exception when this happens, so I can't 
get meaningful ATA error messages. Of course these happen before the 
buffer cache is flushed, so they don't show up in /var/log/messages, if 
anything is showing up at all.

Many thanks for any help you can provide...

regards,
BMS