System Load Extreme and Non Responsive

[Keith Clark]

My system seems to become unresponsive every about half hour and the
Load goes through the roof.  CPU usage does not seem to be high, nor
network usage during this period.

I looked at my syslog for that time period and I see the following block
of entries over and over again:

Nov 25 11:28:57 bookworm-acerdesktop kernel: [ 9440.533198] ata1.00:
exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x7 SErr 0x0 action 0x0
Nov 25 11:28:57 bookworm-acerdesktop kernel: [ 9440.533208] ata1.00:
irq_stat 0x40000008
Nov 25 11:28:57 bookworm-acerdesktop kernel: [ 9440.533226] ata1.00: cmd
60/f8:08:89:22:8b/00:00:1b:00:00/40 tag 1 ncq 126976 in
Nov 25 11:28:57 bookworm-acerdesktop kernel: [ 9440.533230]          res
41/40:00:22:23:8b/e7:00:1b:00:00/40 Emask 0x409 (media error) <F>
Nov 25 11:28:57 bookworm-acerdesktop kernel: [ 9440.533260] ata1.00:
status: { DRDY ERR }
Nov 25 11:28:57 bookworm-acerdesktop kernel: [ 9440.533264] ata1.00:
error: { UNC }
Nov 25 11:28:57 bookworm-acerdesktop kernel: [ 9440.534164] ata1.00:
SB600 AHCI: limiting to 255 sectors per cmd
Nov 25 11:28:57 bookworm-acerdesktop kernel: [ 9440.535146] ata1.00:
SB600 AHCI: limiting to 255 sectors per cmd
Nov 25 11:28:57 bookworm-acerdesktop kernel: [ 9440.535152] ata1.00:
configured for UDMA/133
Nov 25 11:28:57 bookworm-acerdesktop kernel: [ 9440.535171] ata1: EH
complete

Is this evidence of a drive error?  It seems to have begun after a power
failure and only happens to one user, the one who was logged in at the
time of the power failure.  The other user does not experience this same
issue.

Thanks,

Keith