Re: [gentoo-security] AMD64 + Hard Drive weirdness...

[Robert Larson]

Hello Jeff,


I've had 3 machines exhibit this kind of behaviour in the last few months.

On the first machine, it was an intermitten IDE controller failure (probably 
related to heat and expansion of motherboard compoenents).  I was able to 
bypass it by installing a PCI SATA controller.  The way that I was able to 
figure this out was by running knoppix on it (I tried windows too, just in 
case).  When running knoppix (and, that OTHER os), the problems still 
occured.

The second and third machines were having problems because the wrong drivers 
were loaded for the motherboard IDE controller.  On the first of these 
machines, I ran knoppix and it correctly loaded the drivers (I used lsmod to 
find them ;-).  On the second of these machines, it was a production machine, 
and it took a lot of time because I couldn't just bring it down.  I was 
getting "operation not permitted" when trying to enable DMA.  Eventually, I 
had performed lspci, and saw the controller, then noticed that it was 
compiled into the kernel as a different controller.

As far as it goes for your situation, I would recommend running knoppix to see 
if the autodetection can resolve it.  If that doesn't work, it may be that 
it's simply getting confused between those two similar controllers.  Does 
"hdparm /dev/hda" show any useful info?  How about "hdparm -i /dev/hda"?  If 
you try to make settings (such as set DMA "hdparm -d1 /dev/hda") does it spit 
out errors?  I think hdparm may tell you more in this situation because the 
disc reads are insanely slow (1MB/sec should be more like 50MB/sec).  It 
might be worth walking through this just to see if it gives you any errors:
http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Use_hdparm_to_improve_IDE_device_performance

I hope this gives you enough to go on...


Regards,


Robert Larson



On Thursday 16 February 2006 08:58 am, Jeff wrote:
> Hey all.
>
> Gentoo Linux AMD64 - running pretty sweet - except, I've noticed that
> even under minimal loads, my system seems to have mini-lockups
> frequently. For instance, when downloading a mere 10 emails, my system
> seems to choke - to the point where I can't even move my mouse for a
> good 10 seconds or so. Opening a gnome-terminal is painful - sometimes,
> apps make the desktop freeze for a good 20-30 seconds. I did a large
> emerge last night using the gnome-terminal, and it rendered my Gnome
> desktop almost completely frozen.
>
> Any idea what might be causing this, and what steps I should take to
> troubleshoot this? The best I can tell, the problem seems to be hard
> drive related, as it does a lot of chewing before the app finally let's
> rip. The hard drive is an IDE, not SATA as you might expect from the
> info below. Other than these strange mini-lockups, my system is buzzing
> right along at a good clip!
>
> Thanks!
>
[snip]
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