[mythtv-users] OT: SATA errors

[Brian Wood]

On Wednesday 08 July 2009 18:54:53 Harry Devine wrote:
> George Mari wrote:
> > Harry Devine wrote:
> >> I know this is off-topic, but I figured someone here would know.  My
> >> Myth MBE (Mythbuntu 8.10 x86_64) seems to be in a really bad state
> >> right now.  It was fine last night, but tonight I noticed that when I
> >> was SSH'd in, I was getting errors suddenly about the file system
> >> being read-only.  So I figured I'd reboot.  When I did, I got some
> >> messages about having to run fsck manually, and every service that
> >> tried to start would error out saying that the service user didn't
> >> exist (like "www-apache" for example).
> >>
> >> I was able to get the box to come up in rescue mode and I ran the
> >> fsck option that came up.  When I did, I started seeing errors like
> >> the following:
> >>
> >> ata1.00: exception Emask 0x10 SAct 0x6 SErr 0x90202 action 0x3 frozen
> >> ata1.00: irq_stat 0x01400000, PHY RDY changed
> >
> > I saw this error on a brand-new frontend I built last year.  Turned
> > out to just be a loose SATA cable.  Make sure yours are plugged in
> > all-the-way, on both ends.
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>
> I just checked that, and even replaced the SATA cables on both drives.
> I also moved them from SATA 1 & 2 to SATA 3 & 4 on the motherboard.
> Same issues.  I know that my OS was on /dev/sda (partitions sda1 ->
> sda7).  I am booted off of the Mythbuntu 8.10 LiveCD right now, and
> wanted to do a check on the hard drives.  It keeps telling me that
> either I have to be root to do that or the device is busy.  How can I
> run fsck in this case to check the drives?

Ubuntu and its derivatives (like Mythbuntu) assume you are too stupid to be 
root. Not the way to make me happy with them.

You could try the usual Ubuntu solution of using sudo, as in:

 sudo fsck (options like -y) /dev/sd<n>

Then input your user password when it asks, not the root password, since there 
is none.

Or try:

sudo passwd root

To give your system a true root password. Be careful.

This should allow you to run fsck. You'll probably get some griping about 
checking a mounted filesystem, so you should unmount it if you can. 
Run "mount" to see what's mounted.

But it sounds like a hardware problem, and fsck may well fail. I'd try 
mounting the drives on another machine if you can, if they work you have it 
narrowed down to the cables, connectors or motherboard, or just possibly a 
bad power supply.

Do not connect the SATA power and the "legacy" power connectors at the same 
time, this can cause problems.

-- 
Brian Wood
beww at beww.org