Hi, I'm using dd on openSUSE TW 20160113 to zero out (/dev/zero) 2 SATA hard drives, and have plugged them both into a generic USB docking station that has always allowed me to read SMART data from any drive and never had any problems transferring terabytes of data. I wanted to zero both drives out because they were given to me as possibly faulty, and in my research I've found that zeroing out a disk can make bad sectors surface, and then show up in the SMART data which is exactly my intention. The issue I just had is that with the first disk (WD Blue 500 GB), after dd ran for some time it locked my system up and I couldn't log out of or restart Plasma. I switched to a different TTY and issued the "reboot" command as root, and even then systemd was giving me "a start job is running" message which appeared about 3 times, for different processes. One notable thing which errored out is my home partition wasn't properly unmounted. I then just hit the reset switch because I wasn't going to sit there all night. The UEFI BIOS then hung until I yanked the USB cable out of the USB port. Before powering the SATA docking station down, I had a Windows laptop nearby which I plugged the docking station into, and it hung up on installing the USB drivers, and just sat there with a spinning circle. I then powered the docking station down and then back up, and drivers were instantly found. I then plugged the SATA docking station's USB cable into my openSUSE PC and it didn't hang on boot and everything was normal again. When I ran smartctl on the drive, a new error came up: ---------- *Read SMART Log Directory failed: scsi error medium or hardware error (serious) ** **** **Warning! SMART ATA Error Log Structure error: invalid SMART checksum. ** **SMART Error Log Version: 1 ** **No Errors Logged * ---------- From then on, that error came up when running smartctl on that drive and was very slow to display information in terminal. So I figured the drive was pretty much toast, even though there wasn't anything else interesting in the SMART logs reads with smartmontools. I checked on smartmontools' website and it says the software does support reading SMART data over USB. It looks as though possibly a bad logic board on the drive temporarily messed up firmware in the USB docking station, which in turn wreaked havoc with Linux. I'm getting the feeling that Linux with its monolithic kernel is very unforgiving if you have a bad USB device, or, in my case (if my guess is right) a bad logic board on an HDD which in turn messed up the firmware on the docking station. The same exact thing happened with the second drive; a Hitachi 750 GB HDD. Drive was inserted into the USB docking station, I ran dd while periodically checking SMART data in another terminal window, and eventually plasma started choking and I had to reboot from another TTY. This time there was no problem unmounting /home, but the "a start job is running" error came up on a couple processes. I believe this time I did unplug the USB cable before issuing the reboot command, and maybe if I hadn't done that the same thing would have happened as before where it couldn't unmount /home on my SATA HDD in my computer and it would have hung up making me then press reset. Once again, I couldn't boot the system with the USB docking station plugged into USB port. The UEFI graphical BIOS would hang at "B4", which is in a little readout in the lower right-hand corner which gives you status on the POST process. As soon as I unplugged the docking station, it stopped hanging at "B4" and was fine. So obviously the USB docking station can be brought to its knees by a bad drive or is faulty, but I doubt the latter because I've never had this issue with it. Again, as before with the previous drive, as soon as I power cycled the docking station with the Hitachi plugged in, there were no hangs on boot and everything went back to normal. Currently i'm running dd on a known good drive which itself is plugged into the docking station, and monitoring its progress to see if maybe the problem wasn't with the two drives but rather the docking station. However, it looks as though it's going to make it through the full wipe. No freezes yet, and it's almost finished. I may test with a live USB Linux image plugged into my laptop, and do the dd wipe there since I can't afford to have my main desktop cut down to a stump again, and have everything go to complete crap. I would like some input as to how something like what I wrote about can crap up the whole system bus and make Linux an unhappy camper. Is this one of the weaker areas of the kernel, a bug, or something else? Maybe it wouldn't have happened on Leap, and has something to do with the kernel on TW? Update: the known good drive finished the dd wipe process without locking up my system. SDM -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org