On Apr 23, Philip B Cook
If a disk has erratic blocks, it will loose first DMA, then tries PIO, and at last reset the bus. I had to recover failing harddisk several times for customers, this one looks a bit different, as I always had IDE opcodes and reset messages in log. The freezing system is a sign for kernel trouble.
Sometimes now I see the last message in the log is
ide0: reset: success
then then machine freezes. But it does not occur every time.
I have stripped down the machine, disconnected and reconnected the hard drives. I have re-installed LINUX (though not yet allowed YOU to get any updates) using the same LVM disk partition arrangement, but re-formatted all the partitions. I am presently restoring the data to the LVM. I will let you know if the problem recurs.
The most efficient way to check your hard drive is a vendor specific tool which is usually booted off a small boot-cd or floppy image and can be downloaded from your harddrive vendors homepage. It uses internal commands of the drive and may even repair bad sectors (remap them to spare sectors). Everything else is a waste of time (imho). Markus