Hi,
with being exposed to more and more failed hard disks
reports, I've accumulated several questions of the
logged messages in /var/log/messages file: like how to
identifying failed disks(partitions), where is the
exact failed sector(s) on the hard disk, and why
badblocks reports OK to the reported disk failure.
Let me explained the above with the following several
example.
scenario #1, a PATA hard disk failed..
Host: host1
.....
Jun 21 16:55:09 host1 kernel: hda: dma_intr:
status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
Jun 21 16:55:09 host1 kernel: hda: dma_intr:
error=0x40 { UncorrectableError }, LBAsect=234304234,
high=13, low=16200426, sector=196487120
Jun 21 16:55:09 host1 kernel: end_request: I/O error,
dev 03:0b (hda), sector 196487120
.....
The case #1, showed that /dev/hda failed in a simple
way, but some stuff are not obvious:
Q1: which failed partition?
"dev 03:0b" looks like /dev/hda11, but no quick
document explains it, /dev/hda11 is just a guess based
on the follwing. -- maybe "/dev/hda11" is a better
string to log if my guess is true?
root@host1# ls -alF /dev/hda11
brw-rw---- 1 root disk 3, 11 Sep 15 2003 /dev/hda11
Q2: which sector failed?
looks like it is sector 234304234 in LBA mode, and
relative to the whole disk /dev/hda(relative to sector
0 of /dev/hda); while it is the sector 196487120 when
relative to /dev/hda11 (sector 0 of /dev/hda11
partition, which may be Gigabytes offset from the
beginning of underlying disk). Is this a reasonable
guess?
Q3: what does the "high=13, low=16200426" means?
Q4: Does linux kernel disk driver tries to relocate
the failed sector --mapping access to it to some other
good sector first, before failling and logging errors
to /var/log/messages?
Q5: "badblocks -s -v -n ..." sometimes can not find
any disk problems even there were reported disk I/O
problems in /var/log/messages? what does that mean?
Thanks a lot...
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