Hard drive geometry possibly borked, weird random errors.

purplecow · 06-14-2005, 11:03 AM

Hello,
I've been encountering some weirdness that I can only link to one command I ran when I first partitioned this drive, (from a livecd with drives unmounted of course):

Code:

sfdisk -d /dev/hda | sfdisk --no-reread -H255 /dev/hda

At the time, I was trying to make the Fedora Core 2 installer to recognize my hard drive which as I recall, was a common problem at the time. Alas, the installer did not work, so I went with Mandrake.
Mandrake's installer also did not get my new hard disk geometry, but still installed happily and I've been using it since.

I have three hard drives. Sometimes, when copying files from hda to the others, some files just refuse to copy. If I try to read those files, they may be just fine, or in varying degrees of corrupteness. If it's a video file, it's hard to see if a glitch in the picture is from bad encoding or a corrput part of the file, so most of the time it goes unnoticed.
Then especially lately I've been having trouble burning stuff to dvd:s. K3B gives an I/O error, "device temporarily unavailable". I would do more research on this, but I'm running out of empty discs.
And then there's this weirdness with sfdisk:

Code:

root# sfdisk -d

sfdisk: seek error: wanted 0x0000000000000000, got 0x0000000000000000
 /dev/hda: unrecognized partition
No partitions found

sfdisk: seek error: wanted 0x0000000000000000, got 0x0000000000000000
 /dev/hdb: unrecognized partition
No partitions found

sfdisk: seek error: wanted 0x0000000000000000, got 0x0000000000000000
 /dev/hdd: unrecognized partition
No partitions found

And fdisk's view:

Code:

root# fdisk -l

Disk /dev/hda: 120.0 GB, 120060444672 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 14596 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/hda1   *           1        1275    10241406    7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/hda2            1276        1286       88357+  83  Linux
/dev/hda3            1287        1352      530145   82  Linux swap
/dev/hda4            1353       14596   106382430    f  W95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/hda5            1353        2635    10305666   83  Linux
/dev/hda6            2636       14596    96076701    0  Empty

Disk /dev/hdb: 120.0 GB, 120060444672 bytes
16 heads, 63 sectors/track, 232632 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 1008 * 512 = 516096 bytes

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/hdb1   *           1       41884    21109378+   b  W95 FAT32
/dev/hdb2           41885      232624    96132834    f  W95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/hdb5           41885      136871    47873416+   b  W95 FAT32
/dev/hdb6          136872      232624    48259228+  83  Linux

Disk /dev/hdd: 200.0 GB, 200049647616 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 24321 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/hdd1   *           1       12778   102639253+  83  Linux
/dev/hdd2           12779       24321    92719147+   5  Extended
/dev/hdd5           12779       24321    92719116   83  Linux

The two 120GB drives, hda and hdb, are both Samsung spinpoints. (V80 SV1203N and V60 SV1204H respectively), so I find it odd that the reported geometries are so different. Is this my fault?

I'm thinking of buying a new HD to replace my current hda, but I'm not sure if the process of cloning this current drive would also clone my problem?
I've previously cloned disks with just "dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdb -bs=446 -count=1"
Or could I just fix this with "sfdisk -d /dev/hda | sfdisk --no-reread -H16 /dev/hda" ?

Edit:
Oops, forgot the essentials.
I'm running Mandrake 10.1 download edition, kernel 2.6.8.1-24mdk.

ichrispa · 06-15-2005, 02:43 AM

If fdisk can read the disks partitiion table an fsck returns no serious error I don't see any reason why you should buy a new hd. K3B is most propably referring to the disk drive, not the source HD, so check the integrity of the disks or DVD's you are using and make sure that there is no buffer overrun (don't run to many processes while burning).

About that copying problems, check the ownership, permission and permssions of the destination. The rule of thumb is that if you can copy one file, you should be able to copy them all.

purplecow · 06-15-2005, 01:11 PM

Thanks for answering, the burning problem might be what you suggested, I'll try again with minimal amount of other processes, but the file copying is not an ownership issue.

For example, there's a buch of video files I've had on my home partition on hda since last october. I have previously watched all of them with no issues, but now one of them resists
attempts to move to a different hard drive. Midnight commander moves 33% of the file, and then stops with: "Input/Output error (5)". If I try to play the file now, it abruptly stops at 33%. Plays fine if I skip that part, though.
Things like this should not happen, and normally they don't. This is why I'm convinced that something's broken.