I am running a Western Digital TSD-1000EADS DH hard drive. It is not my system drive. My OS is Ubuntu Server 8.04. My PCChipps M830LR motherboard has no SATA controller, so I am using a StarTech PCIESATA2I PCI Card. Three to four times per minute (more often when the drive is reading/writing) I have been getting these errors in /var/log/syslog:
Feb 19 09:05:35 thebone kernel: [50918.164220] ata1.00: exception Emask 0x12 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x1000500 action 0x2
Feb 19 09:05:35 thebone kernel: [50918.164265] ata1.00: BMDMA stat 0x5
Feb 19 09:05:35 thebone kernel: [50918.164283] ata1: SError: { UnrecovData Proto TrStaTrns }
Feb 19 09:05:35 thebone kernel: [50918.164309] ata1.00: cmd 25/00:00:7f:71:9b/00:01:14:00:00/e0 tag 0 dma 131072 in
Feb 19 09:05:35 thebone kernel: [50918.164311] res 51/84:af:7f:71:9b/84:00:14:00:00/e0 Emask 0x12 (ATA bus error)
Feb 19 09:05:35 thebone kernel: [50918.164342] ata1.00: status: { DRDY ERR }
Feb 19 09:05:35 thebone kernel: [50918.164358] ata1.00: error: { ICRC ABRT }
Feb 19 09:05:35 thebone kernel: [50918.487372] ata1: soft resetting link
Feb 19 09:05:35 thebone kernel: [50918.647235] ata1: SATA link up 1.5 Gbps (SStatus 113 SControl 310)
Feb 19 09:05:35 thebone kernel: [50918.707356] ata1.00: configured for UDMA/33
Feb 19 09:05:35 thebone kernel: [50918.707385] ata1: EH complete
Feb 19 09:05:35 thebone kernel: [50918.724057] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] 1953525168 512-byte hardware sectors (1000205 MB)
Feb 19 09:05:35 thebone kernel: [50918.724082] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Write Protect is off
Feb 19 09:05:35 thebone kernel: [50918.724087] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Mode Sense: 00 3a 00 00
Feb 19 09:05:35 thebone kernel: [50918.724115] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Write cache: enabled, read cache: enabled, doesn't support DPO or FUA
My questions: Is this a problem? If so, what can I or should I do about it? Can I install a new or different driver, or is that necessary? Is it mainly a hardware, not driver, problem? Is it something that might go away with a new kernel?
Things I have tried so far:
1. I have run a complete file system check, with the -f option. It said “File System Modified”, but did not indicate that there were any problems otherwise.
2. I have looked at this page: http://ata.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Libata_error_messages and I think what the error message are telling me is that there is a communications error between the PCI bus and the controller card, but getting down to that level is a little over my head.
3. I jumpered this down to 1.5 from 3, its default, when I was trying to install it in a different machine. I ultimately gave up on that because Ubuntu could not successfully start up with the drive and controller card in the computer. It is still jumpered down.
4. When if first got the drive, I put it in the same hardware and was using it under windows (again not the system drive) formatted as NTFS. It did not appear to have any problems, however I did not look at the Windows logs.
Right now there is no irreplacable data on the drive. It’s about half full.
