[plug] SCSI HD Problems

[Earnshaw, Mike]

Pluggers,

Sit down, get a coffee its Jackanory time ....

On a RH6.2 system with an Adaptec 29160 card and a Fuji 20GB SCSI HD I
have been getting the following errors fairly consistently with original
kernel:

Info fld=0x165c5ba Current sd08:06 sense key medium error
Additional sense indicates read retries error
scsidisk I/O error dev 08:06 sector <sector#>
<action ie cp, mv> Input/Output error

Trying to decipher this;

Info fld ??
sd08:06 --> SCSI disk, partition 06 (it is /dev/sda6 that is causing
probs)
Rest self explanatory

Q1: Is the disk cactus? I have seen this problem on a completely
different machine so I thought it was not h/w related. That's a
different story.

The SCSI controller and disk are both less than 12 mths old and that I
have seen the same error on two completely different machines makes me
sceptical it's a h/w problem (both have h/w less than 12mths - maybe I
have a dud supplier?).

When I installed this particular machine I got the install process to
check for bad sectors (switching to M$ mode) surely the O/S would then
not write to these bad sectors? I have down a SCSI card low level on the
HD to detect/clear the bad sectors. [Aside, when I tried Solaris 8 on
this machine it reported 10-15 bad sectors, not been able to get Linux
to do that].

This will be a fairly important machine when released from testing so I
want to try and make sure it is very stable. Would you suggest replacing
the HD or are there more comprehensive tests I can do? I have tried
kernel 2.2-18 and 2.4 in case that was the problem but the results where
pretty inconclusive.

Any pointers please?

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