> >I notice from hdparm that disk write caching is turned on. Any chance > >that there is a problem with the cache not being flushed before powering > >down? pretty unlikly. linux normally offlines the drive before halting. > I would suggest that you should run with the write cache disabled unless > you can verify working barrier support. this is true, but extremely conservative/paranoid. it makes a lot of sense if you're handling banking transactions or if you really see a lot of abrupt power-offs (yank the battery). what are the chances of a drive failing to write dirty blocks when idle, halting? don't get me wrong: write barriers are A Good Thing. just that Linux survived very nicely for many years before such things were bothered with. > The fact that your drive reports IO errors is also worrying - you might > just have a bad drive... You can look at drive help with tools like > smartctl. IO errors trump any concerns for write barriers - there's no need to even think about barriers or cache settings if the disk is, for instance, reporting media errors... - : send the line "unsubscribe linux-ide" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
