[mythtv-users] OT: system disk failure

Stephen Worthington stephen_agent at jsw.gen.nz
Sun Oct 6 01:47:34 UTC 2013


On Sat, 5 Oct 2013 22:27:37 +0200, you wrote:

>Hello all,
>
>This is maybe a off topic, but I am worried about it.
>
>My backend system disk is showing this message on boot:
>
># dmesg | grep error
>[    3.540794] ata3.00: failed to enable AA (error_mask=0x1)
>[    3.541652] ata3.00: failed to enable AA (error_mask=0x1)
>
>I read that it is related to a disk failure, is this really a problem?
>
>Thanks.

A bit of googling finally found some kernel code that displays this
error:

http://lxr.free-electrons.com/source/drivers/ata/libata-core.c

That tells me that this error seems to be related to a feature flag
for SATA II drives.  Further googling shows that it is something to do
with FIS (Frame Information Structure, a type of port multiplier). The
drive apparently advertises that it has the AA (Auto Activate) feature
but when a command is sent to set the AA option, it does not work, so
the kernel reports an error.  Or so the driver thinks - it may be a
driver bug.  Have you updated your kernel recently?

If the drive is not connected via a port multiplier, then it is likely
that you can just ignore this message.  Even if it is on a port
multiplier, as best I can tell, all that will happen is that this
feature will not be used, when possibly the drive supports it.  It is
also possible that the drive has a firmware bug and is advertising a
feature that it actually does not support.

It would be a good idea to use smartctl to check out the drive and see
if there are any other problems, just in case.  And check that the
cable is OK, in case it might be caused by a signaling error in the
cable.  But otherwise I would just get smartctl to run a long drive
test and if it passed, I would ignore this AA error.


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