[Bug 84603] Re: Hard disk I/O randomly freezes when hald is running and optical drive is empty

[Kevin P]

Ran some tests last night:

1. Adding acpi=off as a boot parameter appears to make the system more
stable. I tried various bios and kernel parameter options but the best
combination was leaving the bios in all default settings and adding the
acpi=off to the kernel. This could be a red herring as the problem seems
to be intermittent anyway.

2. I only get problems with a 250GB Maxtor maxline iii drive. An 80Gb
Samsung Spinpoint works with no issues.

3. Booting the system from an old Knoppix disk I got no issues. The
issue appears to lie with how recent kernels interact with the maxline
disk.

4. I am seeing some corruption and had to e2fsck my root partition.


[ 1565.181909] ata4.00: speed down requested but no transfer mode left
[ 1565.181914] ata4.00: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x0 action 0x2 frozen
[ 1565.181920] ata4.00: cmd 20/00:80:46:a4:76/00:00:00:00:00/e2 tag 0 cdb 0x0 data 65536 in
[ 1565.181922]          res 50/01:01:01:00:00/01:00:00:00:00/00 Emask 0x202 (HSM violation)
[ 1565.181932] ata4: soft resetting port
[ 1565.266976] ATA: abnormal status 0x7F on port 0xD007
[ 1565.272358] ATA: abnormal status 0x7F on port 0xD007
[ 1565.285001] ata4.00: configured for PIO0
[ 1565.285008] ata4: EH complete
[ 1565.306696] SCSI device sda: 490234752 512-byte hdwr sectors (251000 MB)
[ 1565.307302] sda: Write Protect is off
[ 1565.307304] sda: Mode Sense: 00 3a 00 00
[ 1565.308249] SCSI device sda: write cache: enabled, read cache: enabled, doesn't support DPO or FUA

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Hard disk I/O randomly freezes when hald is running and optical drive is empty
https://launchpad.net/bugs/84603