News Group Posts

timeout on fixed disk

Although bad hardware is certainly a possibility, this apparently can also be a disk trying to recover from an error. That post explains that Western Digital "Desktop Edition" hard drives can take up to 2 minutes to process an error.

That's a long time and of course your operating system is going to complain bitterly.

Western Digital isn't alone here; see Time-Limited Error Recovery at Wikipedia.

From: Roberto Zini <r.zini@strhold.it>
Newsgroups: comp.unix.sco.misc
Subject: Re: Error message: Timeout on fixed disk???
Date: Wed, 05 Sep 2001 09:11:50 +0200
Message-ID: <3B95D036.8D221207@strhold.it> 

BTors wrote:
> 
> We are running sco unix 5.0.5 and received the following error on our system:
> 
> wd0: timeout on fixed disk dev 1/43
> 
> I have looked for this message in the error message documentation and haven't
> found it.  Does anyone have any idea what this means?  Is it a hard drive
> problem or a controller problem.  This happened about 1.5 weeks ago and the
> system locked up and needed to be rebooted.  There was no messages in the
> syslog or other log files for the system.
> 
> Any advice on isolating what the problem is would be appreciated.
> 
> Thanks,
> Barbara Tors
> NHDOT

Hi .

If I'm not mistaken, I witnessed this particular message in the past;
as far as I know, the system is telling the user that communications
to the HD failed since it was unable to "reply back" in a timely
manner. 

This could be an evidence of an incoming HD failure; check with your
HD manufecturer to see if they have tools & utilities to diagnose
the device. Also, double check the operating environment; if the
device appears to operate in very hot/dusty environments, then it's
likely that some components go out-of-spec (ie, outside of the
guaranteed range of operations), thus giving the error message
you're seeing.

What about the IDE/EIDE cables ? Are you in the position to change
them and see if the problem goes away ?

It's not clear from your message how often the problem occurred;
can you clarify, please ?

Last, can you disclose with us some additional details concerning
the HW being used ?

Hope this helps !

Best,
Roberto
-- 
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Roberto Zini                                email : r.zini@strhold.it
Technical Support Manager -- Strhold Evolution Division  R.E. (ITALY)
---------------------------------------------------------------------
"Has anybody around here seen an aircraft carrier?"                
        (Pete "Maverick" Mitchell - Top Gun)
 

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