I always take it for granted, but forgot to mention, you should also use O_DIRECT to bypass the linux buffer cache. It often gets in the way of error propagation since it is changing your io requests into it's own page sized ios and will also "lie" to you about having written your data in the first place since it's a write back cache. The point is you have to disable all the caches everywhere or the error information will get absorbed by the caches. - Mike -- 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