On Thu, Jan 30, 2003 at 10:44:52AM -0800, Paul Hoffman wrote:
> I have a single IDE drive in a NetBSD 1.6 system. Starting recently, 
> the console tells me:
> 
> wd0e: error reading fsbn 16596096 of 16596096-16596111 (wd0 bn 
> 19775328; cn 19618 tn 6 sn 6), retrying
> wd0: (uncorrectable data error)
> 
> This repeats many times, always the exact same numbers.
> 
> How can I deal with this?

Your hard drive is failing. Often, but not always, uncorrectable errors
are preceeded by correctable errors. Once you start seeing uncorrectable
errors on an IDE disk, either the disk has so many bad blocks that its
relocation table has filled up - or the blocks went bad with no warning,
so they couldn't be read to be relocated.

The former case is the most likely. Just be thankful that you're running
a unix system, where you actually get to _see_ these errors - in
Windows, the OS would just keep retrying, and never tell you there's a
problem. You'd find out when your drive was so far gone that programs
failed or it wouldn't boot...

-- 
David Maxwell, david@vex.net|david@maxwell.net -->
An organization gets what it rewards.
			      - Perry Metzger