Constant hard drive kernel errors

[Daniel Skates]

I have a server running Ubuntu Server 10.4 at home.

After a recent power loss at my home, I tried to SSH into my server but was unable to. I hooked it up to a monitor and rebooted, and got an error message: /dev/mapper/Mustrum-root: UNEXPECTED INCONSISTENCY; RUN fsck MANUALLY.

I (foolishly) tried to run fsck from my server, with the drive still mounted, and I ignored the warning. That didn't resolve my problem. I ran fsck from a live CD, and now the above error message does not appear (instead a friendly /dev/sda1: clean, 204/124496 files, 35686/248832 blocks)

When I start up, shut down, or just leave it for a while (its still running apache, so I'm guessing some log files keep getting accessed, or maybe its some other reason), it gives lots of these blocks of information:

[ xxx.xxxxxx] ata1.00: status: { DRDY ERR }
[ xxx.xxxxxx] ata1.00: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x0 action 0x0
[ xxx.xxxxxx] ata1.00: irq_stat 0x40000001
[ xxx.xxxxxx] ata1.00: failed command: READ DMA EXT
[ xxx.xxxxxx] ata1.00: cmd 25/00:08:f0:bf:4b/00:00:20:00:00/e0 tag 0 dma 4096
[ xxx.xxxxxx] ata1.00: res 51/01:00:f0:bf:4b/00:00:20:00:00/e0 Emask 0x1 (device error)

with the x's increasing each line (so the above block repeated several times), followed by:

end_request: I/O error, dev sda, sector 541835248

I can also get these messages from dmesg

[Philip Muškovac (yofel)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. Unfortunately, we can't fix it without more information.

Please run the following command which will attach necessary information:

apport-collect 613880

Bear in mind that when prompted to give apport-collect permissions for Launchpad you will need to give it at least the ability to "Change Non-Private" data as it will be adding information to your bug report.

If you cannot use apport please at least add the following information (pay attention to lspci's additional options):
First run the following commands:
1) uname -a > uname-a.log
2) dmesg > dmesg.log
3) sudo lspci -vvnn > lspci-vvnn.log
4) cat /proc/version_signature > version.log
then attach the files separately to the bug report (not pasted into comments or tar/zip-ed).

For your reference, the full description of procedures for kernel-related bug reports is available at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/KernelTeam/KernelTeamBugPolicies. Thanks in advance!

[Matt Fischer (mfisch)]

In many cases like this you have a dying hard-disk. You can check on that by installing smartmontools and then checking the SMART data.

smartctl -a /dev/sda (repeat for all your disks)

You can also run a short smart test on the disk:

smartctl -t short /dev/sda

Passing SMART data is not a guarantee that you don't have an issue with your disks, but it's worth a try.

[Jeremy Foshee (jeremyfoshee)]

This bug report was marked as Incomplete and has not had any updated comments for quite some time. As a result this bug is being closed. Please reopen if this is still an issue in the current Ubuntu development release http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/daily-live/current/ . Also, please be sure to provide any requested information that may have been missing. To reopen the bug, click on the current status under the Status column and change the status back to "New". Thanks.

[This is an automated message. Apologies if it has reached you inappropriately; please just reply to this message indicating so.]