I'm currently running into a situation where I have 4 SATA drives in a striped array where one of the drives is failing (/ has failed). The single drive failure manifests itself as ext3 errors and libata SCSI media errors which occur non-stop as software attempts to read/write to the mounted array. Because libata is seeing media errors, the bad drive endlessly soft resets while the software is still running and attempting to access the drive. This winds up hanging the entire system because the software (consider it a 'find' command running on the drive) occurs in the init.d boot scripts. The end result is that a login prompt is never reached until the software finishes what it is doing and hours of soft resets have occurred. Is there any way that this behavior can be stopped by permanently disconnecting the drive after a configurable number of errors that would otherwise soft reset? Does the layer allow for the concept of a full disk shutdown rather than a reset? I assume this would have to forcefully unmount any active mounts which use the drive/array to ensure that no subsequent cmds would cause libata to attempt to reconnect to the bad drive(s). Is this even possible? Using smartd is invaluable for detecting failing drives, but when the failed drive prevents the system from booting, it is hard to recover remotely. It may not be possible to "recover" (e.g. If the failed drive is the boot drive), but that should be up to the system designer. In my case, I would still want to boot into the system (I do not boot from the array), establish network connectivity, and "phone home" that a permanent hardware failure has occurred in the array. Thanks, -Andrew - To unsubscribe from this list: 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
