Re: Crashed Drive, libata wedges when trying to recover data

Alan Cox
2004-09-03T15:22:10Z

On Gwe, 2004-09-03 at 13:51, Brad Campbell wrote:
> Yep.. About 30 seconds per sector is the timeout whereas with 2.6.6 it would never do anything after
> the first timeout. Yes it's slow, yes it could probably be sped up but it is certainly indicative of
> a dodgy disk.
>
> Use something like http://www.kalysto.org/utilities/dd_rhelp/index.en.html and you might have better
> results.
>
> Jeff, do we really have to wait 30 seconds for a timeout? If the drive hits an unreadble spot I
> would have thought it would come back to us with a read error rather than timing out the command.

The drive will retry for a few seconds then fail. The failure now
generates a SCSI medium error to the core scsi layer and it does like to
issue a few retries. The default retry count for scsi is probably too
high for SATA given the drive retries.