X
xane
Guest
I have been tinkering with a FreeBSD setup on an old PC setup for a number of months, please bear with me on this sad story.
As I began with a 1.6Gb disk, it quickly filled up and I started running out of space when I wanted to use the larger applications like KDE. So I ordered a new 30Gb disk, it arrived, and after much research I formed a plan to transfer the /usr slice to the new disk.
Unfortunately this failed with some severe disk errors, on further examination the disk was found to have a large number of bad blocks, so back it went. Six weeks later the retailer eventually conceded that there was no suitable replacement and I got a refund, meanwhile the FreeBSD system had been gathering dust
So, I dug out an older 4Gb disk, started again, but managed to screw it up, and in a moment of madness erased the entire /usr tree trashing the system
I decided to reinstall, I wouldn't lose much as I could easily remember how I'd setup the original system and actually looked forward to going through it again, I did this and halfway through the machine died
Turned out to be a loose RAM stick, reseated and rebooted and restarted the install again. It completed fine but I discovered I'd left out the /usr/ports area, so I started to install that and it looked like it was doing a complete reinstall, so I rebooted to find my /bin directory missing
Install #3, with all the ports, completed fine - hurrah, now for some application loading on all that luvverly clean space, I started with samba and immediately started getting these messages;
ad1: WRITE command timeout ...
Surely not another dud disk, this one has worked fine for years
So, two questions:
1. does anyone know how I can check for bad blocks on FreeBSD, the first dud disk I needed to load onto a Windows system and FDISK, FORMAT then SCANDISK.
2. I suspect, because I am using an old i440TX mobo, there may be a problem with the DMA on the disk and it has resorted to using PIO, I've seen several articles on it and I am considering a few solutions, but has anyone encountered this sort of problem ?
TIA
As I began with a 1.6Gb disk, it quickly filled up and I started running out of space when I wanted to use the larger applications like KDE. So I ordered a new 30Gb disk, it arrived, and after much research I formed a plan to transfer the /usr slice to the new disk.
Unfortunately this failed with some severe disk errors, on further examination the disk was found to have a large number of bad blocks, so back it went. Six weeks later the retailer eventually conceded that there was no suitable replacement and I got a refund, meanwhile the FreeBSD system had been gathering dust
So, I dug out an older 4Gb disk, started again, but managed to screw it up, and in a moment of madness erased the entire /usr tree trashing the system
I decided to reinstall, I wouldn't lose much as I could easily remember how I'd setup the original system and actually looked forward to going through it again, I did this and halfway through the machine died
Turned out to be a loose RAM stick, reseated and rebooted and restarted the install again. It completed fine but I discovered I'd left out the /usr/ports area, so I started to install that and it looked like it was doing a complete reinstall, so I rebooted to find my /bin directory missing
Install #3, with all the ports, completed fine - hurrah, now for some application loading on all that luvverly clean space, I started with samba and immediately started getting these messages;
ad1: WRITE command timeout ...
Surely not another dud disk, this one has worked fine for years
So, two questions:
1. does anyone know how I can check for bad blocks on FreeBSD, the first dud disk I needed to load onto a Windows system and FDISK, FORMAT then SCANDISK.
2. I suspect, because I am using an old i440TX mobo, there may be a problem with the DMA on the disk and it has resorted to using PIO, I've seen several articles on it and I am considering a few solutions, but has anyone encountered this sort of problem ?
TIA