my laptop sometimes stop responding with disk errors

[Asif Iqbal]

On Sat, Mar 5, 2011 at 9:29 AM, Jeff Lane <jeff at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> 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?

only after the kernel upgrade

>
> 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...

thanks a lot for such a detail email.

>
> Cheers,
>
> Jeff
>



-- 
Asif Iqbal
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