Hi, On Mon 23-11-09 03:09:19, tmhikaru@xxxxxxxxx wrote: > Okay, finally had some time to dismantle the machine in question and > inserted the backup drive without the enclosure. Now that I was able to get > smartctl to give me information on what was going on, it seems there's > nothing wrong with the drive itself (no remapped sectors, nothing prefail or > fail going wrong, drive's smart status is good) but it's had a history of > 406 (!!!) errors reported, the last five happening within the same second, > all of which seem (to my untrained eye) to imply a bad IDE cable. Which > means likely my USB enclosure is screwing up. > > To be sure, I did some extended testing with it hooked up: Tried > doing a full and incremental backup of my machine with no errors reported, > as well as an offline and then immediately afterwards, long test via > smartctl. Nothing changed in the output. Yeah, from what you write, it looks like USB enclosure is at fault (or it could still be your USB controller but I doubt it). It's still a bit bothering that the error reported by the drive was not properly propagated up to VFS. Either it's some block layer retry/ignore magic that I missed or we ignore errors from block layer in some place. Honza -- Jan Kara <jack@xxxxxxx> SUSE Labs, CR -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-usb" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html