indefinite wait buffer: Does this indicate hardware issue?

[Peter Jeremy]

On Sat, 2005-Dec-17 04:06:36 +0800, Xin LI wrote:
>No, it's sometimes other, and is quite infrequent.  On the other hand,
>neither SMART nor error has reported some incident, so I was stuck
>when looking on hardware issues, as the message does not indicate
>which disk(s) may have problem...

A hardware error should have been reported as such.  But if you
suspect a disk problem, try dd'ing the swap partition (or the whole
disk) to /dev/null.  If you can read the whole partition, you can
probably write to it.  (Or you could dd /dev/zero to the partitions
whilst swap is not attached - eg in single user after boot).  If you
suspect retries are a problem, monitor the I/O rate with iostat or
systat and see if it suddenly drops.

-- 
Peter Jeremy