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

[Greg Stark <gsstark@mit.edu>]

Alan Cox <alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk> writes:

> On Gwe, 2004-09-03 at 16:58, Greg Stark wrote:
> > I've even unmounted the filesystem and tried mounting it again. Now I can't
> > even mount it without generating the error.
> 
> You may well need to reset or powercycle the drive to get it back from
> such a state.

Certainly I know power cycling fixes it. That's what I've been doing so far.

> > Sep  3 11:48:39 stark kernel: ata1: command 0x25 timeout, stat 0x59 host_stat 0x21
> > Sep  3 11:48:39 stark kernel: ata1: status=0x59 { DriveReady SeekComplete DataRequest Error }
> > Sep  3 11:48:39 stark kernel: ata1: error=0x01 { AddrMarkNotFound }
> 
> "Its dead Jim". Once you get a drive that dies totally (or just keeps
> posting up a hardware fail) after the error you are into forensics
> (and/or backup) land. 

There's nothing the driver can do to reset the drive or get back to a known
good protocol state?

The "ATA: abnormal status 0x59 on port 0xEFE7" makes me think it's just the
driver getting out of sync with the drive. But i guess that would be hard to
distinguish from the drive just going south.

Certainly if I had backups I would long since have given up on this. And I've
already managed to recover the most important stuff from the drive. At this
point I'm still missing some stuff I would like to be able to recover as much
as I can from.

But I'm mostly just interested in helping ensure the driver handles this case
as well as it can. Ideally it should printk errors and return i/o errors to
user-space but reset as necessary and still allow reading good blocks as much
as possible.

-- 
greg