sdb1???

[Nils Kassube]

Leif Gregory wrote:
> I had a bunch of disk activity going on with my laptop which stopped
> shortly after I started looking around to see what was causing it.
>
> I did a dmesg which contained this:
> [28595.603991] Buffer I/O error on device sdb1, logical block 786433
>
> That doesn't quite make sense to me. I don't have an sdb1 AFAIK.
>
> └──> ls /dev/sd*
> /dev/sda  /dev/sda1  /dev/sda2  /dev/sda3  /dev/sda4  /dev/sda5 
> /dev/sdc  /dev/sdc1
>
> So what is it referring to do you think? If I could figure that out I
> could use smartctl to try and more info.

You don't have sdb1 now, but once upon a time you had it for whatever 
reason. You didn't tell us what device is connected as sdc - it is 
probably an external disk connected via USB or firewire. 

Now, this is speculation, but it happened to me with a USB stick: The 
device which is now sdc was sdb previously. There was a file open on sdb1 
when it was unplugged. Then when you plugged it in again, the device name 
sdb was still in use due to the open file. Therefore the kernel assigned 
it the new device name sdc. And the "Buffer I/O error on device sdb1" 
message was logged while the disk was still connected the first time, 
i.e. with the device name sdb1.


Nils