SUMMARY: fsck dumps core

From: Jae An (jae@tpt.cma.mgh.harvard.edu)
Date: Tue Jan 20 1998 - 14:18:36 CST


Hi all,

The general consensus was that reformatting, with a full surface analysis
will help, but still odds do not seem to be very good, because the disk
is unable to read many sector headers, which almost always means that the
media is bad.
I tried formatting one of the partitions (/home) with 2 passes, but it
did not seem to help at all. It seems that the best solution is to buy
a new disk, or just forget about the whole thing, until the machine is
dead.

Thanks to:
Joel Lee <jlee@thomas.com>
"Ayoub, Nicky" <Nicky.Ayoub@avnet.com>
bismark@alta.Jpl.Nasa.Gov (Bismark Espinoza)
Martin Huber <hu@garfield.m.isar.de>
Erwin Fritz <efritz@glja.com>
poffen@San-Jose.ate.slb.com (Russ Poffenberger)
Igor Schein <igor@andrew.air-boston.com>

Original message:

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Hi all,

Model: SPARC 4/370
Machine hardware name: sun4
Operating System: 4.1.3_U1

Contains a disk, with 3 usable partitions:

/dev/xd0a 13591 4359 7873 36% /
/dev/xd0g 97993 66778 21416 76% /usr
/dev/xd0h 456323 10 410681 0% /home

Problem: Unable to fsck them; the problem started a few weeks ago.
         fsck dumps core in 2/3 cases, and in the 3rd case, it can
         not read several blocks.

- Do I need to `gdb' the core file?

Samples of /var/adm/messages:

vmunix: xd0a: write retry (header not found) -- blk #48, abs blk #48
vmunix: xd0a: read retry (header not found) -- blk #48, abs blk #48
vmunix: xd0a: read fixed (soft retry) -- blk #1824, abs blk #1824
vmunix: xd0a: read retry (hard data ecc) -- blk #6, abs blk #6

vmunix: xd0h: read retry (header not found) -- blk #58022, abs blk #430676
vmunix: xd0h: read retry (hard data ecc) -- blk #57954, abs blk #430608
vmunix: xd0h: read fixed (soft retry) -- blk #57904, abs blk #430558
vmunix: xd0h: read fixed (soft ecc corrected) -- blk #955270, abs blk #1327924
vmunix: xd0h: read failed (header not found) -- blk #66, abs blk #372720
vmunix: xd0h: read failed (hard data ecc) -- blk #26, abs blk #372680
vmunix: xd0h: write retry (header not found) -- blk #64, abs blk #372718
vmunix: xd0h: write failed (header not found) -- blk #66, abs blk #372720

vmunix: xd0g: read fixed (soft retry) -- blk #32590, abs blk #195400
vmunix: xd0g: read fixed (soft ecc corrected) -- blk #86848, abs blk #249658
vmunix: xd0g: read fixed (seek retry) -- blk #12682, abs blk #175492
vmunix: xd0g: read retry (hard data ecc) -- blk #65124, abs blk #227934
vmunix: xd0g: read retry (header not found) -- blk #32580, abs blk #195390
vmunix: xd0g: read failed (header not found) -- blk #121232, abs blk #284042
vmunix: xd0g: read failed (hard data ecc) -- blk #144720, abs blk #307530
vmunix: xd0g: read failed (cylinder header error) -- blk #12683, abs blk #175493

I am also skeptical about rebooting it, worried that it will not be able
to come back up again.

Please, let me know what other information you need me to provide.
Thanks in advance for your input.

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