ad0: TIMEOUT - Is my disk dying?

[Christian Walther]

On 30/03/07, Alex Zbyslaw <xfb52 at dial.pipex.com> wrote:
> Christian Walther wrote:
>
> >>
> >> > > I'm seeing a lot of the following messages lately:
> >> > >
> >> > > Mar 29 21:02:01 pixie kernel: ad0: TIMEOUT - READ_DMA retrying (1
> >> > > retry left) LBA=13554983
> >> > > Mar 29 21:02:34 pixie kernel: ad0: TIMEOUT - READ_DMA retrying (1
> >> > > retry left) LBA=35376691
> >>
>
> Just thought I should point out that you can get errors like this if
> your disk drive *cable* is faulty or has wiggled loose.
>
Yes, I know these defects, but this is an IBM Laptop which doesn't has
a cable to connect the HDD to the mainboard. I just checked it as I
replaced the disk. ;-)

So the system is up and running again. Everything went really smooth:
I booted FreeBSIE, dumped all filesystem to a NFS share, replaced the
disk, formatted the new disk, and restored everything. Rebooted the
machine, and here we are. :-)

Thanks everybody for your advice and information.

BTW: If I understand smartmontools correctly the disks firmware
counted 67 r/w errors.