strange harddrive errors

mortals · 15 Jul 2006 at 21:39

I've just had a bit of trouble with my new install of dapper. First of all I got some disk I/O errors when booting my 686-smp kernel.
So I re-booted into my other linux drive and did a fsck on the dapper root partition. It came up with "1.1% uncontiguos files" or something
Then on reboot the vmlinuz for 686 kernel got corrupt and the system just reset on "uncompressing linux".
So I booted into the 386 kernel, no problems there? (same partition). I re-installed the 686-smp kernel etc. On re-boot it all seemed to be going well, got to gdm but suddenly there were disk IO errors again.

"Buffer I/O error on device /dev/hdb3"
INIT: Cannot execure "/sbin/getty"

But now after yet another reboot I am in the 686-smp kernel and it seems to be running perfectly ok?

I'm wondering if it's a harddrive problem or even memory etc?

I just hope it doesn't do it again

maybe my hdd is on its way out :eek:

zetec452 · 15 Jul 2006 at 21:48

You can test your drive with this

And www.memtest.org for the memory tester. If you have any hardware errors these will show you.

mortals · 15 Jul 2006 at 21:52

cool it might be worth a try, the hdd I installed it onto is probably at least 2 years old, possibly older. I just found it strange that it only came up with IO errors on the 686-smp kernel and booted fine on the 386 one tho :confused:

zetec452 · 15 Jul 2006 at 21:55

I did have some problems with the 686 install of Ubuntu so it might be a niggly hardware issue. Still worth running the aformentioned tests to at least rule harware failure out.

Have you MD5'd your download to see if its ok?

mortals · 17 Jul 2006 at 18:03

I ran the tests and all came out ok

So I thought I'd re-partition the drive totally as it was a bit of a mess with 5 or 6 partitions :eek:

Re-installed and as soon as I switched to SMP kernel the same thing happened.

In the end I found out it was to do with hyperthreading.

All I needed to do was edit the grub menu.lst and add in ht=on to the boot line and all of a sudden it works. Seems there is a vulnerability with hyperthreading so they did it that way in the new kernel which is why I can boot in 2.6.3-smp and 2.6.10-smp fine.

Hopefully it will work ok now :rolleyes: