Re: Problem with raidframe: bad disk or bad memory, how to tell?

[buhrow%lothlorien.nfbcal.org@localhost (Brian Buhrow)]

        Well.  Checking each partition individually  adds mystery to the
problem.  Each of the disks reports no errors, and the fsck'ing of each
disk individually looks clean.  Yet, running fsck on /dev/rraid0a yields
similar results to the ones I already posted.  My guess is that I'm seeing
memory corruption.  This makes me wonder  if I need to reboot the machine
without syncing the disks first.  Perhaps I need to install memtest86 to
see if I can exercise the memory and find out where the problem is.
-thanks
-Brian

On Jul 10,  8:39pm, Manuel Bouyer wrote:
} Subject: Re: Problem with raidframe: bad disk or bad memory, how to tell?
} On Thu, Jul 10, 2008 at 11:30:18AM -0700, Brian Buhrow wrote:
} >     Hello.  I have a NetBSD-3.1 system in production which seems to be
} > experiencing a filesystem issue on its raid1 root partition.  The symptoms
} > are that when we tried to run a backup last night, the dump program never
} > completed, and it created an endless dump file.  Also, running fsck on the
} > root partition yields inconsistent results, especially when you consider
} > that this machine isn't that active.
} >     I think that either one of the disks is silently corrupting data,
} > or I have some bad memory in the box.  I'm almost certain it's a hardware
} > issue, but the question is, how to tell which hardware specifically is the
} > problem?  I could try failing one of the disks, but then, if I pick the
} > wrong one, I'm really in trouble.  Is there some utility I can use to
} > compare the contents of the two disks to see if they're equal?  the box is
} > a production box, as I mentioned, so I'd like to avoid bouncing it up and
} > down, at least until I've figured out what  the problem is most likely to
} > b.
} >     Any thoughts?
} 
} For each disk you can create a 4.2BSD partition which matches the RAID-1
} partition, and so run fsck on each drive independantly.
} The matching 4.2BSD partition usually starts 64 sectors after the RAID
} partition
} 
} -- 
} Manuel Bouyer <bouyer%antioche.eu.org@localhost>
}      NetBSD: 26 ans d'experience feront toujours la difference
} --
>-- End of excerpt from Manuel Bouyer