[WBEL-users] Disks failures

[Kuervers.SJ@forces.gc.ca]

My advice to you would be to go to Maxtor's website and download their two
tool diskettes.

MaxBlast - is a configuration disk - not much use except it verifies the
proper configuration of the drives and support for the drives in BIOS.

PowerMAX - this disk will let you test and diagnose the drives.  If you run
the full test (couple of hours if not more for a 200 Gb) it should
essentially 'recertify' the drives if you are having a problem.

It is possible some of your problems could be power related.  Verify you
power supply can handle the load of the drives, etc in the machine.

Since you are using UDMA 133 drives, I assume you are using a good UDMA
(80-wire) cable?  I have seen issues with bad UDMA cables (or old 40-pin
standard cables) causing drive data corruption.

Finally, to help rule out other issues, you can test the drives in the
machine in a 'stripped' configuration.  Disconnect all but just the drive on
the primary controller, and run the PowerMAX disk.  It is just a DOS disk,
so it doesn't need all the other hardware to test.  Just reconnect
everything back to your 'normal' configuration before booting back into
whitebox.

Steve Kuervers
Systems Engineer
Land Force Western Area
Area Simulation Centre (Edmonton)
Department of National Defence (Calian Contractor)
(780) 973-4011 Ext 5831
(780) 973-1557 Fax
CSN 528-5831
mailto:kuervers.sj@forces.gc.ca
http://www.army.dnd.ca/ASC_LFWA/


-----Original Message-----
From: Simone [mailto:simone72@email.it]
Sent: Tuesday, August 17, 2004 4:33 AM
To: whitebox-users@beau.org
Subject: [WBEL-users] Disks failures


Hi all,
I've experienced 2 hard disks failures (bad i/o) in less than 1 month on 
my samba server. I'm now checking the hd with badblocks, but I would 
like to have your opinion on this. Is it possible I'm just out of luck 
or there could be possibly something depending on the OS? Anything I 
should check?
I'm using wbl, latest kernel and latest samba package (but the first 
failure occurred on WBL while I was with an earlier kernel and samba 
package), two disks in mirroring, each a maxtor 6Y200P0 200Gb ide 133, 4 
primary partitions (/boot, /, /samba, swap), each disk on a different 
IDE controller, ECS motherboard K7VTA3 (know it's not the best.....). 
I'm now reading output from badblocks that confirms the hd is broken 
(I/O error), so I'm just wondering if I should be very very worried or 
just average worried. One more info, the hard disks have been bought in 
two different shops, but both disks broke on the secondary IDE controller.

Hope this is enough info, I'd really appreciate your opinion on this.

Thanks, have a nice day
Simone
 
 
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