my laptop sometimes stop responding with disk errors

[Jeff Lane]

On Sat, Mar 5, 2011 at 02:04, Asif Iqbal <vadud3 at gmail.com> wrote:
> $ sudo smartctl --all /dev/sda  shows PASSED

Cool... good for you :)
So the next thing is filesystem problems... Pick out one of the error
messages you're seeing and do a google search on it (without the
timestamps, obviously):

Such as one of these two:
ata1.00: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x3 SErr 0x0 action 0x0
ata1.00: status: { DRDY ERR }

You'll find all sorts of things going way back to Feisty and Hardy...
In a lot of older cases, this seems to be caused by the CD drive, for
some reason.  Or bad cables. In any case, BACK YOUR DATA UP NOW.

You can try booting from the live cd and once you're in, open a
terminal and do this:

Read the man page for badblocks and understand what it's doing and
what the options are:

# man badblocks

MAKE SURE YOU HAVE BACKED UP YOUR DATA!!!

run bad blocks:

# sudo badblocks -n -s /dev/sdaX (where X is the number of the partition)

this should tell you if you have any bad sectors or blocks on the
disk.  You can also try running e2fsck on it:

read the man page for e2fsck:

# man e2fsck

and understand what it's doing and what the options are.  Run fsck:

# sudo fsck.ext4 /dev/sdaX (where X is the number of the partition)

but keep in mind before doing ANY OF THIS, that you NEED TO BACK YOUR
DATA UP NOW.

It still could be a failing hard disk though... SMART is a good tool
for keeping tabs on HDD health, but it's not guaranteed and may not
show you anything at all until just before the disk actually dies.

Some googling of the above tools and the error messages, as I pointed
out earlier, will show you a LOT about the many different types of
problems that can cause those issues to appear.

Also, did you just upgrade?  And did you have these problems BEFORE
you upgraded, or only AFTER you upgraded?

I noticed you're running 2.6.35-28, while I'm still on 2.6.35-25 on
Maverick.  Soooo.... I wonder if this is possibly a kernel bug.  You
should also probably file a bug against the kernel:

on your system, not from within the live CD environment, open a
terminal and do this:

apport-bug linux

Follow the steps and file the bug.  Then read hte bug and make sure
you attach a copy of the dmesg log, syslog, and paste a copy of that
smartctl output you provided here...

Cheers,

Jeff