Comment 59 for bug 217920

I have this problem on an Asus A8JS (Intel ICH7) with several Hitachi Travelstar hard drives I've tried.

Starting from kernel 2.6.26 or so, I would randomly get these errors and eventually the kernel would mount / readonly and I would have to reboot to get anything done. The errors are completely random - sometimes it works for several days at a time and others I can't even get to the gdm login screen. At first I thought it was the hard drive gone bad but after going through several RMAs the Hitachi people started getting suspicious.

Stuff like the following is common in dmesg - the drive eventually gets turned down all they way to UDMA/33 before the kernel gives up. Switching to a 2.6.29 kernel lately reduces the number of hard resets but still eventually messes up.

ata1.00: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x0 action 0x6
ata1.00: BMDMA stat 0x26
ata1.00: cmd ca/00:08:6d:5c:b4/00:00:00:00:00/e6 tag 0 dma 4096 out
         res 51/84:00:74:5c:b4/84:03:00:00:00/e6 Emask 0x30 (host bus error)
ata1.00: status: { DRDY ERR }
ata1.00: error: { ICRC ABRT }
ata1: soft resetting link
ata1.00: configured for UDMA/33
ata1: EH complete
sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] 195371568 512-byte hardware sectors: (100 GB/93.1 GiB)
sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Write Protect is off
sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Mode Sense: 00 3a 00 00
sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Write cache: enabled, read cache: enabled, doesn't support DPO or FUA
ata1.00: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x0 action 0x6
ata1.00: BMDMA stat 0x26
ata1.00: cmd ca/00:08:8d:40:12/00:00:00:00:00/e8 tag 0 dma 4096 out
         res 51/84:00:94:40:12/84:03:00:00:00/e8 Emask 0x30 (host bus error)
ata1.00: status: { DRDY ERR }
ata1.00: error: { ICRC ABRT }
ata1: soft resetting link
ata1.00: configured for UDMA/33
ata1: EH complete

Looks like I've been mounted read only again, time to reboot...