[mythtv-users] Bus Error? Hard drive failing?

James Pifer jep at obrien-pifer.com
Wed May 11 16:52:48 UTC 2005


> No wisdom but a couple of suggestions:
> 
> i) have you got smartd running? If so, take a look at the SMART status
> of the 2 drives and see if any errors have been recorded,
> ii) check to see if the NIC is sharing IRQs with the drive controller
> etc. Maybe change slot to try and get the NIC its own IRQ if it's
> currently sharing, and
> iii) remove/swap out the GBit NIC and see if the system's stability returns.
> 
> Nick

Thought I would give an update since I've been able to play with this
off and on. I believe my problems are definitely centered around the Via
VT6122 Gigabit NIC, and although I think it's the FC3 driver, I'm not
sure. 

The first problem with the NIC is that it's physically difficult to
install. I was testing it on a different machine and the connectors were
not making a good connection and I couldn't even boot the machine. The
end bracket is to far away from the circuit board. So I fiddled a little
with the it and was able to get the bracket to give a little more space.
Then I was able to install the card. I installed ubuntu on the machine
and it found the card and seemed to work fine. 

Unfortunately this is not real good evidence, since FC3 will work fine
for a while too. Although I can make a certain symptom show up on
demand. I put the card back into my FC3 Myth machine and configured it
to be the primary card, and then unactiviated the onboard 10/100 NIC in
FC3. If I try to watch a recorded show from a remote frontend the show
plays for a minute or two and then bombs with the error:
WriteBlock(): Aborting WriteBlock, write to socket failed!

If I unactivate the Via card and re-activate the onboard 10/100 then
everything works fine again. I could try switching PCI slots, but I only
have three slots and my PVR350 and PVR250 are each taking one. I'm
skeptical whether that would help unless someone thinks that it really
could.

Does this tell me it's a driver problem since both NICs are physically
still in the machine and enabled in the BIOS?

Any suggestions based on this information?

Thanks,
James



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