OpenSUSE Hardware :: Hard Disk Frequent Head Unloads - Disk Clicking Whilst Idle?
Jun 2, 2010
I created a thread about a problem a I had with my hard disk clicking whilst idle little while ago and I may now have stumbled upon a possible solution. The strange thing with the problem is that Ubuntu/Kubuntu didn't cause this problem but Opensuse 11.2 does.
I installed Fedora 13 to have a glimpse of what all the fuss was about and noticed that I had the same problem (hard disk clicking whilst idle ~ every 20 secs or so). Now there's a wiki on this subject and a few bug reports: [url]
Problem Description
Some ATA harddrives perform very frequent head unloads under Linux significantly shortening their lifespans. Root cause
The inactivity timer for head unload is configured too aggressively either via ATA APM (Advanced Power Management) feature or other non-standard means. Such aggressive settings are very fragile to changes in IO pattern and under Linux many such drives unload their heads only to re-load them shortly. Note that this relentless unloading/reloading cycle can also be triggered under Windows by installing programs which can alter the IO pattern (e.g. certain vaccine programs which runs in background).
Now two of the listed models with this problem are basically identical to my model (Dell Inspiron 1520) and basically share the same hardware: Dell Vostro 1500 and XPS 1520.
The workaround listed is to:
set APM to 254
Furthermore, there is a script: Storage-Fixup which can also be downloaded from opensuse software search. Indeed there is a report of this for a Vostro 1500: Gmane Loom
The report suggests looking at: Disk Power Management - openSUSE which lists a method to create a configuration file to management disk power management:
My question is whether I could download the storage-fixup rpm [url] has a description of it and it can be found: Software.openSUSE.org) and install it to (hopefully) solve the issue or should I follow the method given in: Disk Power Management - openSUSE
I can frequently hear a short clicking sound emanating from my hard disk. This only seems to happen whilst it is idle. (I don't get this sound when booting to windows vista).
I have a problem in Ubuntu 10.04. The bug is well know which makes the hard disk head to park often (2-3 times per minute) that's dangerous for the drive in the long term and annoying for me (click-click-click).I found out the "ugly-fix" for old Ubuntu version which was :hdparm -B 254 /dev/sda instead of 128. It works. The problem is that it doesn't remains (when restart/standby/ac connection-disconnection).I found a script well known too :Code:1) make a file named "99-hdd-spin-fix.sh". The important thing is starting with "99".2) make sure the file contains the following 2 lines (fix it if you have PATA HDD):
#!/bin/sh hdparm -B 255 /dev/sda 3) copy this file to 3 locations:
I wish openSUSE to supply a daemon, which uses the /dev/freefall to provide hard disk head crash protection. There is an example application in usr/src/linux/Documentation/hwmon/hpfall.c which might be used as a base for such a daemon and the needed modules (hp_accel and lis3lv02d) are present in kernel 2.6.31.
As i understand, after autofs unmounts disk (network or otherwise) it keeps spinning. It costs energy, so i wonder is there any way to put hard disk to idle state after autofs timeout kicks in?
after installing Ubuntu on one WD 500 GB hard disk and after making mistake and pasting wrong code into Terminal:my OTHER WD 500 GB hard disk that was also in the system (I guess it was "hd1") - died.The problem must be, I guess, I typed wrong code: "hd1,1" instead of "hd0,0".)500 GB (NTFS) of data was on that other (non-Ubuntu) hard disk, and now I can not access it anymore. While booting, system gives "Hard Disk Error" warning and stops.One again: I installed Ubuntu od one hard disk and at the end of instalation I pasted wrong code for GRUB, giving address of another hard disk. Now that other hard disk has error and will not work
I have a sata 320 gb with mandriva linux 2009.1 on it.And it is what curently atached to my cpu. It is shown as 'sda' in the partition table.I also have another 40gb hard disk with windows xp installed on it.It is shown as 'hda' in the partition table . Now what i want to do is attach this 40gb hard disk to my pc and configure grub on my 320gb hard disk('sda') so as to boot windows xp(which is residing on the second hard disk,'hda')Can anyone tell me if what im doing is feasible or not? If it is feasible,can anyone suggest me how to get it working. I know i just need to add 2-3 lines to my grub.conf, but dont know what exactly i need to write.
I had a dual boot (windows 7 + debian), both of them installed in my internal hard disk, with the GRUB in it. I have recently installed a second linux distro (mint), but I put it in an external hard disk. Now the GRUB allows me to boot any of the three operating systems, but I need the external disk to do it. It seems that after the mint installation the GRUB is now working from the external disk (if the external disk is not connected, the machine does not boot.) �Is there a way to change the location of the GRUB, to the internal hard disk of my laptop?
I was using Terminal and browsing a directory in my home folder. My "home" directory is located on "/dev/sdb1". When in Terminal I typed "ls" in one of my directories and the output was garbage. The output didn't show the files in the directory. I think it said something like, "input/output error". Unfortunately, I didn't write the exact error down. Instead I rebooted.The hard disk with the problem is:
Code: $ sudo hdparm -I /dev/sdb [sudo] password for brian:
Since upgrading (fresh install) to Lucid, I've been having to go through disk checks about once or twice a week on boot. I'm not sure why Lucid thinks it needs to check my disk so often. I looked into it a bit, and found a command that was supposed to stop disk checks happening so often.
Code: sudo tune2fs -i 2w `mount | awk '$3 == "/" {print $1}'` is supposed to set it to 2 weeks. I used "/home" too as I have home on a separate partition and didn't want that to be checked too. All was fine until I booted up to find another disk check today. It can sometimes take over half an hour to finish and C to cancel doesn't always work either.
I always shutdown cleanly, unless Ubuntu completely locks up, which happens maybe once every six months (although it did happen yesterday, but I have rebooted it a few times since then with no checks happening until just now). Is there a way to just disable checks completely? I wouldn't mind running them manually every now and then, I just don't want to do it as often as Lucid does.
ran out of space in my /home dir. Have a second hard drive to install and would like to designate it as additional space for /home. I do not want to mount it as a dir inside my home I would like it to simply work as though my /home simply has more space available to it.
I'm trying to resize a partition on an IDE hard disk to use the entire disk but can not get more than a 309GB partition. I can get 295, 300, 301, 302GB, etc... fine but start getting problems with anything over 309GB. I get the following error with 310GB or more:
error: block relocator should have relocated 533 Warning: You should reinstall your boot loader before rebooting. Read section 4 of the Parted User documentation for more information. I am using Slackware 12.1, GNU parted 1.8.8, ext2 filesystem.
Every now and then, say with a period of one hour, the system begins accessing the hdd and doesn't stop accessing for at least 5 minutes. What can be the reason? Can it have something to do with the swap partition?
I am on F15 32-bit with GNOME 3. I keep getting "A Hard Disk Is Failing" warnings from the Disk Utility, very frequently. Is this a serious issue? Because I knew this to be a bug in Palimpsest DU back in F13/14. Also how can I disable any notifications from this application?
I keep noticing disk activity every roughly 1 to 3 seconds even though there is "nothing" going on. Of course, I run a number of "system" and "user" application packages - Apache2, MySQL, Browsers (Opera, IceWeasel), an SMB client and server, OpenOffice 3.0RC8 being the most prominent ones. I wonder what might be the cause for this constant disk activity which happens even when none of the applications do any noticeable work at all. Is there a way to determine the process that does those disk read/writes?
Acer Travelmate laptop, 1.3GHz Pentium M, 12MB Ram.pensuse 11.4 (upgraded from 11.3)Vanilla install, not running anything special, always startup and shutdown from scratch, never sleepFor several minutes after KDE appears and I open an app (any app, e.g. Chrome) the hard disk is going nuts. WTF is it doing and how do I stop it? Also some programs take years to start, e.g. digicam took TEN minutes the other day even after waiting a while after booting, the disk thrashing the whole time. But in 11.3 it started almost instantly.
I'm running SUSE 11.3 on hard disk (a). I have a second hard disk (b) which has FreeBSD loaded and would like to copy all that info onto (a), then reformat (b).
How do I mount hard disk (b) to achieve my objective?
I've used YAST to include a USB hard disk in the export list and mount it to remote machine with NFS. That worked first time the disk was mounted. On the next reboot I saw that the USB disk was mounted again in "/media" but in new folder and its previous folder existed but empty and was mounted with nfs. It seems that first nfs comes mounted in booting time and then USB gets mounted after logging as a user. USB hard disk finds its folder occupied and automatically creates new folder in "/media". What should be done in order to USB hard disk and nfs to be mounted in the same point automatically on the boot ? The second question : When I mount an external disk to be accessible remotely with nfs I get refused to unmount the disk as a USB device. Is it possible to be unmounted as a USB disk done without unmounting it as a nfs as well?
I've recently added a new hard disk and due to mother board controllers this new hard disk is known as sda.Before that my boot partition was /dev/sda3 and know this changed to sdb3.Whenever grub menu appears and I choose opensuse,it can't find /dev/sda3 .It seems that I should edit menu.lst or change boot loader parameter.something like root (hd1,2).But I don't how I can do this with opensuse boot loader.Though I could do this with CentOS easily.
I have installed on my computer Fedora 10, now I want to install opensuse and create a dual boot environment and I want to have them both on the same hard disk. how to carry on with this task?
I looking for advice on what is the best way for backup on opensuse in case hard disk failure .
I have opensuse as server running samba (with some share folder) and mysql and web service. for mysql backup I run cron job using automysqlbackup script that run 3 times a day (morning , lunch , evening).
in case of hard disk failure, I wish to be put every things on new hard disk in 1or 2 hours.
I got a new hard drive yesterday, a Seagate Baracuda XT 2000GB SATA3. I'm running it on the SATA3 jmicron chip in AHCI mode, and Opensuse 11.2 is having issues with using this hard drive properly.
The hard drive seems to take a while to detect, for one thing. After it is detected however, I am told I have no hard disk that can be used for installation. The exact message is:
"No hard disks were found for the installation. Please check your hardware!"
After that, I'm told the partitioner can't read the partitions on my hard drive properly:
"The partitioning on disk /dev/sda is not readable by the partitioning tool parted, which is used to change the partition table.
You can use the partitions on disk /dev/sda as they are. You can format them and assign mount points to them, but you cannot add, edit, resize, or rename partitions from that disk with this tool."
I partitioned the new hard drive under Windows, with a partitioning tool called Partition Wizard (free / home version). I'm not sure if hard drives partitioned with this tool are not recognized by OpenSuse's partitioner, or if it's something else.
I already installed Windows on this hard drive, so I can't delete all the partitions I have so far and start all over again (I'm keeping my system a dual-boot between Windows 7 and openSuse 11.2). What can I do so OpenSuse will see and modify my partitions? If it is the partitioning not being understood, is there some sort of tool that can make the partition table of the hard disk linux-readable? (a free Windows program that could do such).
[System: OpenSuSE 11.0 , kernel 2.6.25.20-0.7-pae, athlon i386] I've recently begun to have problems with my Sata Hitachi disk drive; it stores all my documents and music etc. I've only begun to notice these problems when I installed the Ex2 IFS driver for Windows so I could access my data (read only) from my Windows disk. However, the problem is not exclusive to Windows; Windows blue-screens when the Sata link goes down, but SuSE attempts to re-establish a link. Here's the dmesg output (only includes output relevant to disk activity). I've also run smartcl on the disk, here's the output. Note that the output says that it's soft-resetting the link. Any clues as to what this may infer? Also, the system has sometimes failed to boot as it sees the disk as corrupted and asks me to perform a fsck, which rewrites the journal (although this may or may not have been down to the aforementioned driver possibly not playing nice with the journal, even though it is in read only mode) and restores the disk to working order.
I can have periods of days where the disk works perfectly fine on both Windows and SusE, and random events where the disk link goes down for some reason. The situation seems to be remedied by me physically pushing the Sata cable into the disk and motherboard., and returns when the computer tower is subject to a considerable vibration from a slight knock et cetera. On the other hand, this may be a power problem, some ends on a rail are faulty on my PSU and will only give power to my optical drives if they are positioned in a certain angle, although this is probably less likely as the disks don't go offline, just the link.
I set my bios with AHCI, and plugged my external e-sata disk but i can't see it so far in dolphin . i also changed the policykit.conf to the following :
cat /etc/PolicyKit/PolicyKit.conf <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <!-- -*- XML -*- --> <!DOCTYPE pkconfig PUBLIC "-//freedesktop//DTD PolicyKit Configuration 1.0//EN" "http://hal.freedesktop.org/releases/PolicyKit/1.0/config.dtd">
I have a qzd notebook with an rdc 1010 flash drive. I have downloaded the new 11.2 version of opensuse and it now recognises it, so thanks for that.Only trouble is I get an error message of:Failure occured during following action: Setting disk label of disk /dev/sda to msdos. System error code was: -1013A little history is required in orderI had windows xp installed to begin with (fool me ay!) and when I installed the adobe flash player 10, it always crashed my internet explorer, so i managed to find flash player 7, which I installed and it worked (kind of; it played videos, but stallingly; although this might be to do with the fact that i was also upgrading to IE 8 at the same time) but after a few seconds of it playing a video the computer reset and the message DISK BOOT FAILURE, INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER appears. It seems that this flash player was some kind of virus and I worry that it may of damaged the flash drive, or is it that it's just messed up the MBR.
