[plug] harddrive becomes read-only

[Paul Antoine]

Gavin,

I've taken to running a memtest86 for a few hours whenever a system is a 
little random in its behaviour.  The odd flakey bit in a bank of memory 
can wreak such havoc and has proved the most common failure aside from 
disk drive death.

Also, how old are the drives?  Of course with the two drives in an LVM 
you have effectively doubled your statistical likelihood of a volume 
failure as you have to add the MTBF's of the drives, so ageing may be a 
real issue despite each drive being quite young.

How old is the whole system?

P.

Gavin Chester wrote:
> I suspect my system's drive controller is failing. Can anyone use these
> symptoms (below) to confirm my suspicion? I know it's a long shot to
> give definitive diagnosis, given many possible variables:
>
> Setup:
> Two 36Gb SCSI drives setup as LVM giving 72Gb as one volume, running
> from a PCI-X 64bit soclet using an LSI logic 2-channel U320 controller
> through terminated internal 68-pin ribbon cable. 
>
> Symptoms:
> After running for different, random lengths of uptime the system may
> show odd behaviour in the way it's running its apps. Running 'top' as a
> quick process check always reports "input/output error" at this point.
> Or, same as above except it can be in that state as a cold system right
> from booting. Forced reboot (once or even twice, occasionally) sees the
> system recover it's journal and be okay for days on end.
>
> I had a similar problem a few years back with similar setup. In that
> case I finally realised that it always coincided with very hot ambient
> temps and the discs overheating. I'm since using an identical setup but
> with different controller card and mb. I made a point of adding a fan
> blowing directly on the drives - and anyway ambient temps are still
> quite low in my workspace.
>
> Any ideas of what to test for?
>
> Gavin      
>
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