Laptop Saved! (was RAM Mapping Script)

[Bill McGonigle]

Nice detective work, Jim!

On Mar 5, 2008, at 16:28, Jim Kuzdrall wrote:

>    The drive tested the same at 20C with either the -c or -c -c  
> options.

Did you happen to interrogate the S.M.A.R.T status during this  
process?  Usually when a drive fails -c, there's also a S.M.A.R.T.  
error code.

>     So it appeared to be a hangup in the drive's internal controller
> when it has a long series of read/writes to do.  The "locate" database
> search may have triggered it in situ.

You can probably convince the kernel to throw smaller command queues  
at it.  I've had to do this for a Dell PERC 3di RAID controller and a  
few bad NCQ implementations on SATA II drives, esp. under Linux 2.6  
which appears to be more efficient than 2.4 (or Windows) in this  
regard, so some controller firmwares get confused (race conditions,  
small buffers, I dunno).

> I doubt I will ever know and no
> longer care.

Aww, c'mon, push it over 60 hours, and go for the 'really  
environmental' status. :)  Actually, the best reason to try it would  
be that if you got it to work that way, you could report the model  
number back upstream, and there's probably a blacklist for drives  
that do things like this in the responsible driver.  That kind of  
thing can save lots of people heartburn down the road, especially  
folks who are just trying to get Ubuntu installed and can't figure  
out why linux is so unstable...

-Bill

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