Re: Hard Disk Failure

Re: Hard Disk Failure

[rtilley]

> no.  e2fsprogs might cause data loss, but not
> physical damage.

This reminds me of something I read once.

In his book, Takedown, Tsutomu Shimomura (forgive me if that's spelled wrong) 
wrote a few short paragraphs about how he was able to move the head-arm of a 
magnetic disk drive back and forth with software commands. He could tell the 
head-arm to go to any cylinder on the drive, he wondered what would happen if 
he tried to send it to a cylinder that was outside the physical limits of the 
drive. He told the drive (a 200 cylinder drive) to goto cylinder 4000. The 
drive actually tried to go to that cylinder and caused a hardware failure in 
the process.

Is it still possible for software to damage hardware in this fashion or is 
hardware smarter now? Do drives know not to try and access a cylinder that is 
outside their physical limits?

Re: Hard Disk Failure

[Lionel Bouton]

On dim, jan 26, 2003 at 09:33:11 -0500, rtilley wrote:
> Is it still possible for software to damage hardware in this fashion or is 
> hardware smarter now? Do drives know not to try and access a cylinder that is 
> outside their physical limits?
> 

I guess not :

Recently I moved one drive from one old system to a new one. The new BIOS
couldn't be configured to use the old geometry -> I couldn't use the drive
to boot (unless repartitioning the 120GiB beast).

During the migration process I tried different geometry settings and at
several times the cylinder number was way above the drive's actual limit.
I could hear loud "bumps" when the drive accessed the higher cylinders.
Each time I rushed to the reset button...

This was with a SiS735 chipset and a Maxtor 4G120J6.

LB.

Re: Hard Disk Failure

[John Bradford]

> > no.  e2fsprogs might cause data loss, but not
> > physical damage.
> 
> This reminds me of something I read once.
> 
> In his book, Takedown, Tsutomu Shimomura (forgive me if that's
> spelled wrong) wrote a few short paragraphs about how he was able to
> move the head-arm of a magnetic disk drive back and forth with
> software commands. He could tell the head-arm to go to any cylinder
> on the drive, he wondered what would happen if he tried to send it
> to a cylinder that was outside the physical limits of the drive. He
> told the drive (a 200 cylinder drive) to goto cylinder 4000. The
> drive actually tried to go to that cylinder and caused a hardware
> failure in the process.

It's actually possible to make some old mainframe hard disks 'walk'
across the floor, by doing various seeks across the disk :-).

> Is it still possible for software to damage hardware in this fashion
> or is hardware smarter now? Do drives know not to try and access a
> cylinder that is outside their physical limits?

Since modern hard disks are not accessed by their physical
geometries', I would imagine that it would be rare to be able to cause
physical damage to a disk by sending a reference to an out of range
sector.  The disk has to translate the sector you send to it in to
it's real geometry anyway, so there should be no way to translate an
invalid sector in to an invalid physical geometry location, which it
could then not seek to.

John

Re: Hard Disk Failure

[Richard B. Johnson]

On Mon, 27 Jan 2003, John Bradford wrote:

> > > no.  e2fsprogs might cause data loss, but not
> > > physical damage.
> > 
> > This reminds me of something I read once.
> > 
> > In his book, Takedown, Tsutomu Shimomura (forgive me if that's
> > spelled wrong) wrote a few short paragraphs about how he was able to
> > move the head-arm of a magnetic disk drive back and forth with
> > software commands. He could tell the head-arm to go to any cylinder
> > on the drive, he wondered what would happen if he tried to send it
> > to a cylinder that was outside the physical limits of the drive. He
> > told the drive (a 200 cylinder drive) to goto cylinder 4000. The
> > drive actually tried to go to that cylinder and caused a hardware
> > failure in the process.
> 
> It's actually possible to make some old mainframe hard disks 'walk'
> across the floor, by doing various seeks across the disk :-).
> 
> > Is it still possible for software to damage hardware in this fashion
> > or is hardware smarter now? Do drives know not to try and access a
> > cylinder that is outside their physical limits?
> 
> Since modern hard disks are not accessed by their physical
> geometries', I would imagine that it would be rare to be able to cause
> physical damage to a disk by sending a reference to an out of range
> sector.  The disk has to translate the sector you send to it in to
> it's real geometry anyway, so there should be no way to translate an
> invalid sector in to an invalid physical geometry location, which it
> could then not seek to.
> 
> John

In a previous life, I wrote a Disk utility called SPINOK.
It was posted on my BBS (The PROGRAM EXCHANGE) and became
the major product of a company that made a (copy, clone,
theft?) called Spin-Rite. This utility would determine
the optimum interleave for a disk drive. It would first
save the data from a track into memory, then format the
track, then write the data back.

Most disk drives in those days used the ST-506 interface,
however, when the IDE interface became popular, it was
necessary to determine the geometry of the drive before
attempting to format a track with the new interleave. This
was necessary because the track headers contain the cylinder
as well as the head and sector. If this gets written wrong,
you have the slowest drive you can imagine!

So, the utility tries first to determine the number of cylinders,
then the number of sectors per track, then the number of heads.
It does this by trying to read head 0 (all drives have head 0),
sector 1 (all drives have sector 1), cylinder 1024 (the maximum
possible in those days. It would  "work backwards" to determine
the whole geometry. It used Newton's method for quick convergence
so it didn't have to try all combinations.

It was possible for a disk to get "stuck" if it seeked (sought)
to a cylinder that was too high. However, a power-off reset
would fix it because, during power up, the drive always moved
the head-arm throughout the platters to minimize "stiction" and
get the heads flying.

Having mucked with many disk drives, I don't thing it's possible
to kill them from "commands" unless the command is "upload firmware".
If you happen to upload Linux instead of the correct firmware, the
drive may "go penguin" and all bets are off!

Cheers,
Dick Johnson
Penguin : Linux version 2.4.18 on an i686 machine (797.90 BogoMips).
Why is the government concerned about the lunatic fringe? Think about it.

Re: Hard Disk Failure

[Arindam Dey]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 3381 bytes --]

--- Mark Hahn <hahn@physics.mcmaster.ca> wrote:
> > Now this Distribution is bundled along with its
> own
> > Hardware and about 45% of these PC's Harddisk are
> > failing after a period of 2-3 weeks. On
> reinstallation
> 
> not IBM DTLA's, I hope.
> 
> > they become ok but again after 2-3 weeks they fail
> > again and finally after 2 months of this the Hard
> Disk
> > fails COMPLETELY and cannot be used again for any
> 
> you need to get some actual data here, not this
> "completely" 
> nonsense.  do you mean it doesn't spin up?  if so,
> there's 
> nothing that the software (including the OS) could
> have done
> to cause it.
> 
> > All I want to know is what is the probability that
> the
> > above oversight of e2fsprogs version is
> responsible
> > for the HDD failure thats all. Since we are
> totally
> 
> no.  e2fsprogs might cause data loss, but not
> physical damage.
> 

I am  using Kernel -2.4.19. The ouput of /proc/ide/sis
is as follows
############# /proc/ide/sis
######################################
SiS 5513 Ultra 66 chipset
--------------- Primary Channel ----------------
Secondary Channel
-------------Channel Status: On                       
       Off
Operation Mode: Compatible                      
Compatible
Cable Type:     80 pins                          80
pins
Prefetch Count: 512                              512
Drive 0:        Postwrite Enabled               
Postwrite Disabled
              Prefetch  Enabled               
Prefetch  Disabled
              UDMA Enabled                     UDMA
Disabled
              UDMA Cycle Time    2 CLK         UDMA
Cycle Time    Reserved
              Data Active Time   3 PCICLK      Data
Active Time   8 PCICLK
              Data Recovery Time 1 PCICLK      Data
Recovery Time 12 PCICLK
Drive 1:        Postwrite Disabled              
Postwrite Disabled
              Prefetch  Disabled              
Prefetch  Disabled
              UDMA Enabled                     UDMA
Disabled
              UDMA Cycle Time    4 CLK         UDMA
Cycle Time    Reserved
              Data Active Time   3 PCICLK      Data
Active Time   8 PCICLK
              Data Recovery Time 1 PCICLK      Data
Recovery Time 12 PCICLK

#############the output of hdparm -i /dev/hda is as
follows############
Model=ExcelStor Technology ES3230, FwRev=ES7CA25A,
SerialNo=MA15HAX
Config={ Fixed }
RawCHS=16383/16/63, TrkSize=0, SectSize=0, ECCbytes=57
BuffType=DualPortCache, BuffSize=2048kB,
MaxMultSect=16, MultSect=16
CurCHS=16383/16/63, CurSects=-66060037, LBA=yes,
LBAsects=58615258
IORDY=on/off, tPIO={min:120,w/IORDY:120},
tDMA={min:120,rec:120}
PIO modes: pio0 pio1 pio2 pio3 pio4
DMA modes: mdma0 mdma1 mdma2 udma0 udma1 udma2
AdvancedPM=no
Drive Supports : Reserved : ATA-1 ATA-2 ATA-3 ATA-4
ATA-5

The problem is random in nature it occurs on its own
giving dma error at boot time when it is checks the
hard disk.

hda: dma_intr: bad DMA status (dma_stat=35) ;
hda: dma_intr: status=0x50 { DriveReady SeekComplete }
hda: dma_intr: bad DMA status (dma_stat=35)  
hda: dma_intr: status=0x50 { DriveReady SeekComplete }
hda: dma_intr: bad DMA status (dma_stat=75)
The hexadecimal values of the status are different.

I have attched the dmesg and the lspci output also.

__________________________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now.
http://mailplus.yahoo.com

[-- Attachment #2: dmesg --]
[-- Type: application/octet-stream, Size: 6034 bytes --]

Linux version 2.4.19 (root@localhost.localdomain) (gcc version 2.96 20000731 (Red Hat Linux 7.1 2.96-98)) #3 Fri Dec 13 14:50:32 MYT 2002
BIOS-provided physical RAM map:
 BIOS-e820: 0000000000000000 - 000000000009fc00 (usable)
 BIOS-e820: 000000000009fc00 - 00000000000a0000 (reserved)
 BIOS-e820: 00000000000f0000 - 0000000000100000 (reserved)
 BIOS-e820: 0000000000100000 - 0000000006ff0000 (usable)
 BIOS-e820: 0000000006ff0000 - 0000000006ff3000 (ACPI NVS)
 BIOS-e820: 0000000006ff3000 - 0000000007000000 (ACPI data)
 BIOS-e820: 00000000ffff0000 - 0000000100000000 (reserved)
111MB LOWMEM available.
Advanced speculative caching feature not present
On node 0 totalpages: 28656
zone(0): 4096 pages.
zone(1): 24560 pages.
zone(2): 0 pages.
Kernel command line: auto BOOT_IMAGE=linux ro root=302 BOOT_FILE=/boot/vmlinuz-2.4.19-1.4 console=/dev/tty3 CONSOLE=/dev/tty3 console=ttyS0,9600n8
Local APIC disabled by BIOS -- reenabling.
Found and enabled local APIC!
Initializing CPU#0
Detected 1002.274 MHz processor.
Console: colour dummy device 80x25
Calibrating delay loop... 1998.84 BogoMIPS
Memory: 110796k/114624k available (1110k kernel code, 3440k reserved, 438k data, 400k init, 0k highmem)
Dentry cache hash table entries: 16384 (order: 5, 131072 bytes)
Inode cache hash table entries: 8192 (order: 4, 65536 bytes)
Mount-cache hash table entries: 2048 (order: 2, 16384 bytes)
Buffer-cache hash table entries: 4096 (order: 2, 16384 bytes)
Page-cache hash table entries: 32768 (order: 5, 131072 bytes)
CPU: Before vendor init, caps: 0383fbff 00000000 00000000, vendor = 0
CPU: L1 I cache: 16K, L1 D cache: 16K
CPU: L2 cache: 128K
CPU: After vendor init, caps: 0383fbff 00000000 00000000 00000000
Intel machine check architecture supported.
Intel machine check reporting enabled on CPU#0.
CPU:     After generic, caps: 0383fbff 00000000 00000000 00000000
CPU:             Common caps: 0383fbff 00000000 00000000 00000000
CPU: Intel Celeron (Coppermine) stepping 0a
Enabling fast FPU save and restore... done.
Enabling unmasked SIMD FPU exception support... done.
Checking 'hlt' instruction... OK.
POSIX conformance testing by UNIFIX
enabled ExtINT on CPU#0
ESR value before enabling vector: 00000000
ESR value after enabling vector: 00000000
Using local APIC timer interrupts.
calibrating APIC timer ...
..... CPU clock speed is 1002.2671 MHz.
..... host bus clock speed is 100.2265 MHz.
cpu: 0, clocks: 1002265, slice: 501132
CPU0<T0:1002256,T1:501120,D:4,S:501132,C:1002265>
mtrr: v1.40 (20010327) Richard Gooch (rgooch@atnf.csiro.au)
mtrr: detected mtrr type: Intel
PCI: PCI BIOS revision 2.10 entry at 0xfb0d0, last bus=1
PCI: Using configuration type 1
PCI: Probing PCI hardware
PCI: Using IRQ router SIS [1039/0008] at 00:01.0
Linux NET4.0 for Linux 2.4
Based upon Swansea University Computer Society NET3.039
Initializing RT netlink socket
Starting kswapd
Journalled Block Device driver loaded
ACPI: Core Subsystem version [20011018]
ACPI: Subsystem enabled
ACPI: System firmware supports S0 S1 S4 S5
Processor[0]: C0 C1 C2
ACPI: Power Button (FF) found
ACPI: Multiple power buttons detected, ignoring fixed-feature
ACPI: Power Button (CM) found
ACPI: Sleep Button (CM) found
ACPI: Thermal Zone found
vesafb: framebuffer at 0xd0000000, mapped to 0xc7810000, size 16384k
vesafb: mode is 640x480x8, linelength=640, pages=24
vesafb: protected mode interface info at cbe5:000c
vesafb: scrolling: redraw
Console: switching to colour frame buffer device 80x30
fb0: VESA VGA frame buffer device
pty: 256 Unix98 ptys configured
Serial driver version 5.05c (2001-07-08) with MANY_PORTS SHARE_IRQ SERIAL_PCI enabled
ttyS00 at 0x03f8 (irq = 4) is a 16550A
Uniform Multi-Platform E-IDE driver Revision: 6.31
ide: Assuming 33MHz system bus speed for PIO modes; override with idebus=xx
SIS5513: IDE controller on PCI bus 00 dev 01
SIS5513: chipset revision 208
SIS5513: not 100% native mode: will probe irqs later
SiS630
    ide0: BM-DMA at 0x4000-0x4007, BIOS settings: hda:DMA, hdb:DMA
hda: ExcelStor Technology ES3230, ATA DISK drive
hdb: OEM CD-ROM F563E, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM drive
ide0 at 0x1f0-0x1f7,0x3f6 on irq 14
hda: 58615258 sectors (30011 MB) w/2048KiB Cache, CHS=3648/255/63, UDMA(66)
hdb: ATAPI 52X CD-ROM drive, 128kB Cache, UDMA(33)
Uniform CD-ROM driver Revision: 3.12
Partition check:
 hda: hda1 hda2 hda3 hda4 < hda5 >
Floppy drive(s): fd0 is 1.44M
FDC 0 is a post-1991 82077
RAMDISK driver initialized: 16 RAM disks of 4096K size 1024 blocksize
loop: loaded (max 8 devices)
NET4: Linux TCP/IP 1.0 for NET4.0
IP Protocols: ICMP, UDP, TCP, IGMP
IP: routing cache hash table of 512 buckets, 4Kbytes
TCP: Hash tables configured (established 8192 bind 8192)
NET4: Unix domain sockets 1.0/SMP for Linux NET4.0.
kjournald starting.  Commit interval 5 seconds
EXT3-fs: mounted filesystem with ordered data mode.
VFS: Mounted root (ext3 filesystem) readonly.
fbcon: creating proc entry
Freeing unused kernel memory: 400k freed
Real Time Clock Driver v1.10e
Adding Swap: 265064k swap-space (priority -1)
usb.c: registered new driver usbdevfs
usb.c: registered new driver hub
PCI: Found IRQ 10 for device 00:01.2
PCI: Sharing IRQ 10 with 00:01.3
usb-ohci.c: USB OHCI at membase 0xc884b000, IRQ 10
usb-ohci.c: usb-00:01.2, Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] 7001
usb.c: new USB bus registered, assigned bus number 1
hub.c: USB hub found
hub.c: 3 ports detected
PCI: Found IRQ 10 for device 00:01.3
PCI: Sharing IRQ 10 with 00:01.2
usb-ohci.c: USB OHCI at membase 0xc884d000, IRQ 10
usb-ohci.c: usb-00:01.3, Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] 7001 (#2)
usb.c: new USB bus registered, assigned bus number 2
hub.c: USB hub found
hub.c: 2 ports detected
EXT3 FS 2.4-0.9.17, 10 Jan 2002 on ide0(3,2), internal journal
kjournald starting.  Commit interval 5 seconds
EXT3 FS 2.4-0.9.17, 10 Jan 2002 on ide0(3,1), internal journal
EXT3-fs: mounted filesystem with ordered data mode.
kjournald starting.  Commit interval 5 seconds
EXT3 FS 2.4-0.9.17, 10 Jan 2002 on ide0(3,5), internal journal
EXT3-fs: mounted filesystem with ordered data mode.

[-- Attachment #3: lspci --]
[-- Type: application/octet-stream, Size: 2812 bytes --]

00:00.0 Host bridge: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] 630 Host (rev 21)
	Flags: bus master, medium devsel, latency 32
	Memory at d8000000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=64M]
	Capabilities: [c0] AGP version 2.0

00:00.1 IDE interface: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] 5513 [IDE] (rev d0) (prog-if 80 [Master])
	Subsystem: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] SiS5513 EIDE Controller (A,B step)
	Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 16
	I/O ports at 4000 [size=16]

00:01.0 ISA bridge: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] 85C503/5513
	Flags: bus master, medium devsel, latency 0

00:01.1 Ethernet controller: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] SiS900 10/100 Ethernet (rev 83)
	Subsystem: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] SiS900 10/100 Ethernet Adapter
	Flags: bus master, medium devsel, latency 32, IRQ 15
	I/O ports at e000 [size=256]
	Memory at dd101000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=4K]
	Expansion ROM at <unassigned> [disabled] [size=128K]
	Capabilities: [40] Power Management version 2

00:01.2 USB Controller: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] 7001 (rev 07) (prog-if 10 [OHCI])
	Subsystem: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] 7001
	Flags: bus master, medium devsel, latency 32, IRQ 10
	Memory at dd102000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=4K]

00:01.3 USB Controller: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] 7001 (rev 07) (prog-if 10 [OHCI])
	Subsystem: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS]: Unknown device 7000
	Flags: bus master, medium devsel, latency 32, IRQ 10
	Memory at dd100000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=4K]

00:02.0 PCI bridge: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] 5591/5592 AGP (prog-if 00 [Normal decode])
	Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0
	Bus: primary=00, secondary=01, subordinate=01, sec-latency=0
	I/O behind bridge: 0000d000-0000dfff
	Memory behind bridge: dd000000-dd0fffff
	Prefetchable memory behind bridge: d0000000-d7ffffff

00:0e.0 Multimedia audio controller: C-Media Electronics Inc CM8738 (rev 10)
	Subsystem: C-Media Electronics Inc CMI8738/C3DX PCI Audio Device
	Flags: bus master, medium devsel, latency 32, IRQ 11
	I/O ports at e400 [size=256]
	Capabilities: [c0] Power Management version 2

00:0e.1 Communication controller: C-Media Electronics Inc CM8738 (rev 20)
	Subsystem: C-Media Electronics Inc CM8738
	Flags: medium devsel, IRQ 15
	I/O ports at e800 [size=64]
	Capabilities: [40] Power Management version 2

01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] SiS630 GUI Accelerator+3D (rev 21) (prog-if 00 [VGA])
	Subsystem: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] SiS630 GUI Accelerator+3D
	Flags: 66Mhz, medium devsel
	BIST result: 00
	Memory at d0000000 (32-bit, prefetchable) [size=128M]
	Memory at dd000000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=128K]
	I/O ports at d000 [size=128]
	Capabilities: [40] Power Management version 1
	Capabilities: [50] AGP version 2.0

Re: Hard Disk Failure

[John Bradford]

> > do you mean it doesn't spin up?  if so, there's nothing that the
> > software (including the OS) could have done to cause it.

Unless the firmware has become corrupted.

John

Hard Disk Failure

[Arindam Dey]

Hi people,

I have subscribed myself to this mailing list just to
ask this question although this may not be the right
place but we are desperate. Somebody please HELP US.

According to the Changes Document in the Kernel Source
tree the minimum version of e2fsprogs required for
2.4.18 and 2.4.19 is 1.25. We were making a
distribution and due to a horrendous oversight the
version of e2fsprogs remained old as in 1.23-2. We are
using ext3 filesystem.

Now this Distribution is bundled along with its own
Hardware and about 45% of these PC's Harddisk are
failing after a period of 2-3 weeks. On reinstallation
they become ok but again after 2-3 weeks they fail
again and finally after 2 months of this the Hard Disk
fails COMPLETELY and cannot be used again for any
distribution to be installed.

All I want to know is what is the probability that the
above oversight of e2fsprogs version is responsible
for the HDD failure thats all. Since we are totally
clueless and are unable to replicate the problem in a
controlled environment.

Thanks in advance,

Arindam Dey

__________________________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now.
http://mailplus.yahoo.com