[mythtv-users] Mythbuntu stalling with HDD light solid

[Justin Johnson]

On Mon, Apr 12, 2010 at 7:29 AM, Doug Lytle <support at drdos.info> wrote:
> Aaron Whitehouse wrote:
>>
>> On a few occasions when it has stalled, I have killed mythbackend (sudo
>> stop mythtv-backend) and the system continues stalling for another couple of
>> minutes. I had decided that the problem could be the hard drive itself,
>> because I would get a lot of stalls whenever it was accessing
>
> That would be my guess.  What does dmesg|grep -i dma show?
>
> Sounds like the drive is going bad, you'll probably see a lot of dma
> timeouts.  You may want to install smartmontools and use:
>
>  smartctl -H /dev/sd(x) (Or whatever your drive is mapped to)
>
>  smartctl --all /dev/sd(x)
>
> And see if the drive is reporting errors.
>
> Doug
>

I had a similar issue with my WD EADS 2TB drive shortly after I bought
it, though my "timeouts" were only a few seconds. I didn't know what
was causing it and just let it go. After a couple weeks the entire
system pretty much failed. I couldn't do anything. After I got a
replacement drive from WD, I checked the original with smartctl and
found an incredible number of pending sectors and a number of other
errors. I second the suggestion to check smartctl. On a side note, I
highly recommend setting up smartd and have it e-mail you when it
finds a problem.
--Justin Johnson