Re: Strange disk corruption with Linux >= 2.6.13

[Grzegorz Kulewski <kangur@polcom.net>]

On Tue, 27 Sep 2005, Rogério Brito wrote:

> Hi, Grzegorz. Thank you for your response.

Hi, no problem.

> On Sep 27, 2005, at 8:43 AM, Grzegorz Kulewski wrote:
> > What is your southbridge?
>
> The southbridge is a VIA VT82C686.

I know. I had the same southbridge in my Abit KG7 but I don't know if you 
have version A or version B. I had version B and it has several disk 
problems fixed. For version A there are some workarounds in the kernel.


> > Maybe there are some problems there with DMA or cables.
>
> Humm, cables. I forgot to check that. I will check that as soon as I wake up. 
> I spent the entire night trying to fix this, but of course, I gave up after 
> some days of effort and decided to ask for help.
>
> > Anything in logs?
>
> Nothing in the logs. No oops, no stack trace, no nothing. :-( Oh, now that

I don't think that there will be any oops or something like that. But 
maybe some IDE messages - like failed commands or something. But if there 
are no such messages then chance is that this is some memory/mb problem.


> you mention it, I remember that I also made my Matrox G400 use speed 4x. I 
> will try slowing it down to see if there is any influence on what I see.

Yes, slowing down your graphics card could help.


> > Maybe sourthbridge or northbridge is simply overheating? Maybe you have bad 
> > power suply? What are readings of temperatures and voltages in BIOS after 
> > some heavy disk-memmory activities?
>
> I don't know, because lmsensors doesn't give accurate measurements, 
> unfortunately. :-(

So after burning reboot fast end check the BIOS measurements. Temperatures 
will not change that much in minute or two. If your system is overheating 
they will be high for at least 5 minutes after reboot.


> > You can use http://pyropus.ca/software/memtester/ to check your memory in 
> > linux. You can run cpuburn at the same time. And you can do some disk 
> > activity at the same time (for example dd if=/dev/hda bs=200M | md5sum 
> > several times to check if it will give the same results).
>
> I had already tried using memtester, but I guess that I was too ambitious 
> with the amount of memory that I tried it to allocate. I will try this, but 
> with my filesystem in read-only mode, as I cannot afford to loose what I have 
> (and Debian's mondo/mind isn't working right now---I already filed a bug 
> report that is shared by others).
>
> > I will bet that you have some hardware problem there. You can try to remove 
> > the 256MB DDR module and turn HIGHMEM off. You can also try to check each 
> > module separately.
>
> I already checked each module separately, but I didn't see any corruption. I 
> guess that I maybe wasn't paying too much attention. I will try it again. 
> Thanks for the suggestion.


Hmm... What did you change before the system started not working? Maybe 
try with only 256MB module installed if that was the working 
configuration...


> > And the best choice will be probably to buy new mb (for example Abit KW7 or 
> > KV7) because your is very old and it can start to silently break after so 
> > many years... Today mbs are very short living parts - 3-4 years and they 
> > are broken...
>
> Yes, I was just trying to avoid getting a new system now, with all the 
> transitions going on (i386 -> x86_64 CPUs, PATA -> SATA etc). But my time is

Yeah, I am waiting for stable and better x86_64 too. But I replaced my KG7 
to KW7 in the mean time just to be sure I have something before I will 
buy x86_64. :-)


> also costing me some nights of sleep... :-( It sucks not to be in the US, 
> where things are cheaper. :-(

Yeah, it sucks. I live in Poland and we have really big prices for 
computer parts here. :-(


> Thank you very much, Rogério.

No problem.


Grzegorz Kulewski