[mythtv-users] Mythtv recording filesystem (sata) goes read only

Roger Heflin rogerheflin at gmail.com
Fri Apr 4 18:22:24 UTC 2008


Rich West wrote:
> Since moving off of a couple of IDE drives for my mythtv recording file
> system to a single large 500gb SATA drive (3.0gb, but the motherboard
> only supports 1.5gb), and then upgrading the entire system (new
> motherboard, dual-core processor, new ram), I've had some randomly
> consistent problems with the file system (random in the fact that the
> issue comes about after a seemingly random amount of time, but
> consistent in the fact that it happens frequently enough to be
> painful).  But, honestly, I am not sure if it is hardware (drive,
> motherboard chipset?) or software (Linux driver, LVM, ext3, or specific
> to mythtv pounding on the drive)..
> 
> The symptom is that Linux reports (in dmesg) that the drive has
> experienced an ext3 journal error and it remounted it in read-only
> mode.  What gets logged is:
> Apr  3 16:55:03 mythtv1 kernel: ata4.00: status: { DRDY }
> Apr  3 16:55:03 mythtv1 kernel: ata4: soft resetting link
> Apr  3 16:55:03 mythtv1 kernel: ata4.00: configured for UDMA/33
> Apr  3 16:55:03 mythtv1 kernel: ata4: EH complete
> 
> 
> I've tried swapping the drive with one of the same kind, and the problem
> has continued.  I cannot seem to correlate what it happening (if
> anything in particular) on the system, but it a mythtv backend and that
> volume does get a lot of use (3 PVR150's, 1 HDHomerun, and 3 frontends).
> 
> I was wondering if anyone had bumped in to a similar issue with their
> backend, and, if so, what steps they took to diagnose it.  I've
> considered going straight ext3 (removing LVM), changing to something
> like xfs, and/or pulling the 500GB and putting in a 400PATA + 300SATA
> (concat LVM ext3)
> 
> (as I was writing this, I did come across
> http://mandrivausers.org/index.php?showtopic=28130.  While I am running
> Fedora8, it probably is worth testing or swapping out the memory)
> 
> Thanks!
> -Rich


Which sata controller is on the MB?    Are there bios settings that control how 
the sata controller acts?  And if so, have you tried the various bios settings 
that control how the sata card acts?   The various bios options sometimes change 
the driver needed (which may will very likely either change the error, or make 
it go away completely), so make sure that you know how to do a rescue boot, and 
rebuilt the initrd with the new driver.

If you are getting that ATA error, you have a problem below the filesystem, 
changing to a different file system will change what happens when you get the 
error, but you will still get the error and have problems of some sort.

It is also fairly unlikely to be a memory error, if you were just getting the 
ext3 ro error, that could be memory.

A full dmesg would be best for someone to determine what was happening.

                         Roger


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