OFF TOPIC: hard drive problems

[Josh Paetzel]

On Wed, Apr 30, 2003 at 05:42:15AM -0700, Andrew Gould wrote:
> Is my hard drive about to fail? I've had the same
> hardware for several months without a problem.  While
> running insert sql statements, I received the
> following messages:
> 
> ad1: write command timeout tag=0 serv=0 - resetting
> ata0: resetting devices..ad0: DMA limited to UDMA33,
> non-ATA66 cable or device
> done
> 
> ad1: timeout waiting for DRQ - resetting
> ata0: resetting devices..ad0: DMA limited to UDMA33,
> non-ATA66 cable or device
> done
> 
> I was unable to do anything after that.  When the
> system rebooted, it could not find FreeBSD.  I could
> only reboot to FreeBSD after rewriting the mount
> points using disklabel from the FreeBSD 5.0 CD#1.
> 
> This happened twice yesterday.
> 
> I'm running FreeBSD 4.8-Stable and PostgreSQL 7.3.2. 
> Win2K is on the first hard drive of IDE0.  FreeBSD is
> on the slave hard drive of IDE0.  The hard drive in
> qeustion is a Western Digital 80GB ATA100 hard drive
> with an 8MB buffer. All hard drives in the computer
> are ATA100, which is supported by the motherboard.
> 
> Any advice would be appreciated.
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Andrew Gould

www.wdc.com has diagnostic tools for your drive.  You'll have to run them from 
windows, but that shouldn't be a big deal for you.

Josh