My system takes ages to boot because of "buffer I/O errors"

[Alexander Jones]

About half-way through bootup, usplash goes away and my kernel starts spitting out error notices on the console.

From my kernel log:

Nov 21 10:35:50 localhost kernel: [17179739.508000] hdb: dma_intr: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
Nov 21 10:35:50 localhost kernel: [17179739.508000] hdb: dma_intr: error=0x40 { UncorrectableError }, LBAsect=6319626, high=0, low=6319626, sector=6319625
Nov 21 10:35:50 localhost kernel: [17179739.508000] ide: failed opcode was: unknown
Nov 21 10:35:50 localhost kernel: [17179739.508000] end_request: I/O error, dev hdb, sector 6319625

I get about 20 or so of these on bootup, and they take about 10 seconds to appear between each one. After this happens, my system boots and operates fine.

[Brian Murray (brian-murray)]

Usually "DriveReady SeekComplete Error"s and "UncorrectableError . . sector=6319625" are indicative of bad sectors on your hard drive. I am guessing that hdb is your magnetic storage and not a CD or DVD ROM drive. Is this correct? There is an open source software package called smartmontools that includes a program called smartctl that is a "Control and Monitor Utility for SMART Disks". From a prompt you could run 'smartctl -t short /dev/hdb' or 'smartctl -t long /dev/hdb' to test the fitness of the drive.

[Brian Murray (brian-murray)]

Your bug lacks information we would need to investigate further. We
are now going to close the bug - please reopen if you have more
information at hand.