what does these messages mean ?
 

I see this message related to my hard drives a lot on most of my machines.I dont quite understand what is it ? Do i need to be worry about it or its some random message?

LAPTOP

my dmesg on desktop is filled with these messages

I found this on another forum... maybe it can be of some help?

"DRDY ERR messages actually seems to be reported as a kernel bug in a lot of systems which seems to relate a lot with Ubuntu and to a smaller extent Debian. I am investigating this because this is something that has started happening with me recently. I would recommend the following (You will require a bootable CD for some of this and you may need it due to disk issues for all of this. The Ubuntu desktop install CD works well without making you install anything):

Put "options libata noacpi=1" in /etc/modprobe.d/options.conf

Run "e2fsck -f -c -v /dev/sda1" but replace /dev/sda1 with the partitions causing the error. As far as I know, e2fsck needs a partition with the file system so this probably won't work on the whole disk. If it does work on the whole disk, you still need to run it on the partitions anyways. You need a bootable CD for this.

Edit the file /boot/grub/menu.lst and on the line that starts with "# kopt" add "noapic" to the end of the line. The # at the start is important and does not act like a comment. Do not remove the #.

This does not affect the disk but if you change "splash" to "nosplash" and remove the word "quiet" from /boot/grub/menu.lst on the line that starts with "# defoptions" Then it will not have an image when you boot ubuntu but instead will give you more verbose output.

On Ubuntu, after you change anything inside /boot/grub/menu.lst you must run /usr/sbin/update-grub"

Before doing anything, backup your data. Then get the diagnosis tool of your harddisks manufacturer and test your harddisk. Most of the time I have seen something like that the harddisk was dying.

I would have thought that, except he says it is happening across multiple machines... and it seems rather unlikely that all the drives went bad at the exact same time. But backing up data is always a good idea.

The message "status: { DRDY ERR }" means that the kernel device driver is not correctly handshaking with the storage device. It is more likely that the kernel module used to contact the device is buggy than the disk is faulty, or that active power management is causing the disk to take too long to spin up and the resulting messages are interpreted by the kernel as the disk being full. Commonly the fault is noticed when sata1 disks (1.5Ghz) are used because they tend to have smaller on board buffers than sata2 (3Ghz) disks.

Start by checking that the queue_depth parameters are the same for both disk and motherboard.