Dead disk? READ_DMA Failure

[Francisco Reyes]

On Mon, 1 Aug 2005, [ISO-8859-1] Erik Nørgaard wrote:

>> In my case I added to /usr/local/etc/rc.d a script with
>>
>> /sbin/atacontrol mode 1 udma66 pio4
>>
>> Basically slowing down the channel to the drive.. the pio4 is for the
>> CDrom and that was it's normal speed.
>
> Thanks! Well, I wish that I had known that before I tried
> reinstalling the system.

If the problem is either a dying IDE drive or what I mention above 
re-installing won't help, so you still need to see what's going on. In my 
case I was getting the errors daily so it was easy to see if the slowdown 
helped.