<div class="gmail_quote">On Thu, Jun 19, 2008 at 2:05 PM, Johnny Russ <<a href="mailto:jruss@mit.edu">jruss@mit.edu</a>> wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="PADDING-LEFT: 1ex; MARGIN: 0px 0px 0px 0.8ex; BORDER-LEFT: #ccc 1px solid">Let me give a little background on how I got into my current conundrum. I got a couple of 250 GB SATA drives from a friend and I wanted to put them in my backend for extra storage. My backend is an old PIII 1 GHz Dell computer with two 160 GB PATA drives. I had to use a SATA to PCI card. I did a clean install and was using all of the storage in a RAID/LVM volume. I finally got everything set up and going but my system kept crashing. I tracked it down to some kernel bug with SATA to PCI cards that has been around for a while and is unlikely to be fixed soon. So I took out the 250 GB drives and figure I will put them to good use elsewhere. I have my system all backed up so I will just get it back to how it was. Simple right? :). <br>
<br>I got everything set back up on the two 160 GB drives. My system started crashing again, but in a different way. It won't reboot (invalid disk error). I get things up with system rescue CD. One of the drives indicates there is no parition structure and gparted indicates that it is a 2048 TiB drive (I wish ;) ). Fdisk says it is -2042.... MB (yes that is a minus). This must be some default largest possible value I am guessing. At first I assume my drive is hosed. I run testdisk to see if it can find the partitions. It is giving me read errors on every cylinder as it is searching, so I back out of that with out finishing the search or making any changes. Voila! now gparted can see the drive fine with the correct size and partitions. I run fsck.xfs/e2fsck and everything is fine. <br>
<br>The next day things crash exactly the same way. This time I realize the drives are connected to my motherboard in a different order than they were before. I have an old motherboard that has the 137 GB LBA limit issues. So I put the drives in the other order and copy my /boot and / partitions over to the good drive how things were before this whole mess started. I thought there might be an issue with the 137 GB limit. I remember previously that I was OK as long as I don't have any partitions larger than 137 GB. I set up things again but I split the storage up in to smaller partitions and then put them all into one logical volume with LVM. This time system doesn't crash anymore because the system files are on the good drive. But the LV goes down eventually and the bad drive is showing up with no partitions and 2042 TiB. Searching for a minute or two with testdisk and then quiting will frequently bring the drive back from oblivion. I don't know why. <br>
<br>I ran smartctl --test=long and badblocks -svw on the drive and they came up with nothing. So I don't think the drive is actually faling. At least not in any normal way that I am familiar with. <br><br>Smart indicates that it passes it self test when I tell it to run while the drive is in the messed up state. But it does complain about some Smart data structures and the drive information is garbled. Here is what smartctl -a gives me when things are messed up:<br>
<br>Warning! Drive Identity Structure error: invalid SMART checksum.<br>=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===<br>Device Model: Ma|tor$6]160T0$ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $<br>Serial Number: ]45L\HWE$ $ $ $ $ $<br>Firmware Version: ]AV45BW0<br>
<br>When I bring the drive back to life by searching with testdisk, the smart data is back:<br><br>=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===<br>Model Family: Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 family<br>Device Model: Maxtor 6Y160P0<br>
Serial Number: Y41LXHWE<br>Firmware Version: YAR41BW0<br><br>I realize this is a little OT but I haven't seen anything like this, and I know some people around here have probably put large drives into old systems. Any ideas what is going on or what I can do about it?<br>
<br>I would rather not have to explain to my wife why MythTV is broken again because I was 'fixing' things. </blockquote>
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<div>Try a different IDE cable perhaps. Maybe you bent/frayed or otherwise mangled the ribbon in the messing around. Check the pins all around to be sure none are bent also.</div>
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<div>Kevin</div></div>