I stuck a scavenged 120-gig IDE hard drive in my desktop Linux box at work. For now, it’ll house my MP3 collection, which is rapidly outgrowing the 35-gig partition it had been living on. My eventual plan is to get a couple of large (say, 300 to 350 gig), identical drives, keep one at work and one at home, and use them to house all of my MP3s, digital photos, etc. as well as backups of all my machines. I’d keep the disks synchronized with unison or something similar, and then I’d have my data replicated in two locations. But as usual, I digress.

As I was copying my MP3s over to the new drive, I got a few happy-fun-ball I/O errors in my kernel log:

Mar 14 13:36:00 sonata kernel: hda: dma_intr: error=0x40 { UncorrectableError }, LBAsect=7374122, sector=7084952
Mar 14 13:36:02 sonata kernel: hda: dma_intr: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
Mar 14 13:36:02 sonata kernel: hda: dma_intr: error=0x01 { AddrMarkNotFound }, LBAsect=7374122, sector=7084952 Mar 14 13:36:04 sonata kernel: hda: dma_intr: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
Repeated 20 or 30 times.

Odd thing is, the errors were on my main disk (hda), not the scavenged disk (hdb). The main drive has never had a single issue before. That makes me think “kernel issue” more so than “bad disk” (running 2.4.31). I googled around a bit, and found some (admittedly a bit dated) advice to turn off the CONFIG_IDEPCI_SHARE_IRQ and CONFIG_IDEDMA_PCI_AUTO flags. Tried this, but it made the machine really sluggish whenever there was disk I/O, and all of a sudden I started having problems ripping CDs. So I turned CONFIG_IDEDMA_PCI_AUTO back on, which sped things back up made ripping work again. So now, I guess I need to keep an eye out for I/O errors again. When I was getting them, I was copying 20+ gigs of data from the master IDE drive to the slave IDE drive. Ever since I stopped doing that, I’ve had no problems on either drive. We’ll see I guess..