ata3 and ata4 disk errors

[JD]

On 11/19/2012 07:43 AM, Alan Cox wrote:
> On Mon, 19 Nov 2012 07:09:38 -0700
> JD <jd1008 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> I am getting lots of ata3 and ata4 errors in the system log.
>> In spite of these errors, when I unmount the partitions of both drives
>> and I fsck every partition, no errors are found.
>> The out of dmesg with the errors is at
>> http://www.sendspace.com/file/761te2
>>
>> The drives are esata-2 (300mbits/s) and are housed in brand new external
>> enclosures
>> with 80mm fans, connected to the laptop via a 32-bit cardbus with 2
>> esata-2 ports.
>>
>> The drives themselves are not new. One of them is 6 years old, the other
>> 4 years old.
>> Their former enclosures, which were also equipped with 80mm fans, were
>> discarded due
>> to their power supply failures.
>> Hoping a hard drive expert could tell me if the errors are caused by the
>> cardbus adapter
>> or the hard drives themselves.
> All I can tell you is that the kernel issued a DMA read and it came back
> as an error, we then waited for the drive to go back to ready and it
> didn't so we tried resetting it and that didn't make much sense at all,
> so it tries various resets and it seems eventually the drive comes back
> to life. Then later it fals again on a DMA write.
>
> Very hard to tell to be honest.
>
Thank you Alan,
If the cardbus esata adapter were having HW problems, what sort
of errors should I see in the system log regarding that card?