Re: Strange disk corruption with Linux >= 2.6.13

["Rogério Brito" <rbrito@ime.usp.br>]

Hi, Guennadi.

On Sep 27 2005, Guennadi Liakhovetski wrote:
> Version B here. It first had only 128MB, worked fine, I added 256MB,
> system become unstable, memtest86 found "bad memory" around the last
> megabytes.

This is *quite* similar to what I am seeing.

> Then I bought 512MB, hoping to use it with 256MB - no way.

Again, similar to what I see.

> Every module alone works, but not together. But in my case memtest86
> did find errors.

This is something puzzling: when I first installed the modules to get
1.25GB, things "worked", but I had problems with memtest86+ (not
memtest86).

I changed things (removing modules), got frustrated having only 512MB on
the system with all the other modules laying around here and put them
back.

This second time, I reduced the latency on the BIOS from 2-2-2 to 3-3-3
and it booted and memtest86+ did't find any errors. Yet, I saw some
corruption, which was what prompted me to send the original mail to
linux-kernel (since I didn't know if it was a hardware or a software
problem, as memtest86+ had not found any errors).

> Try removing the 256MB module?...

Right now, I'm only using one 512MB module, but after I have already
paid for the second one, and it wasn't cheap. :-(

I suspect that the system is stable now, but I am not sure. If I
reinstall some packages with apt, it still gets some problems with the
md5sum signatures of *other* packages, which is highly weird. But I
don't see any other problems.

Puzzling, huh? I already run a SMART offline/long self-test on the disk
(to rule out it being a problem) and it passed with flying colors. I
also already used badblocks on this very disk (but in read-only mode),
and it also didn't find any problems.

I have a Quantum FIREBALLlct15 drive here.


Thanks,

-- 
Rogério Brito : rbrito@ime.usp.br : http://www.ime.usp.br/~rbrito
Homepage of the algorithms package : http://algorithms.berlios.de
Homepage on freshmeat:  http://freshmeat.net/projects/algorithms/