Hi,

I've been trying to transfer my system from my 4 old faithful hardware raid-5 disks to two shiny new serial ATA drives (WD + Maxtor), following my recent upgrade to an Abit NF7-S v2.0 MoBo. I successfully re-installed Mandrake 9.1 on the WD drive, but every time I try to copy either my /usr/local directory to the same disk, or my /home directory to my Maxtor drive, the system crashes (complete hard freeze) after a few hundred Megs of data. I have tried both the old installation and the installation CDs in rescue mode, with the same problem. Does anyone know of any relevant compatibility issues?

Cheers,

-karl

Aside from the fact that an ungodly amount of Western Digital drives fail, I know that many WD drives have general compatibility issues in all Linux distributions.

A friend of mine and I have been seeing apparently random freezes on our NF7-S v2.0 boards as well, we're both running Gentoo Linux, and have tried a variety of kernels. I'm currently running plain 2.4.21 sources. We suspect that it is hard drive activity related, but we don't have any hard evidence of it. Oddly, we havn't had any problems during the Gentoo install. I also have a Western Digital 80GB Caviar Special Edition drive, but I'm not using the SATA interface.

What's this issue with WD drives? I've never heard of it before.

Ahh! Western Digital bad! Western Digital bad!

Western Digital has been on Linux sh*t lists before for problems like this... and I must say, every Western Digital drive I've used in a Linux system has caused an eventual hard freeze in Knoppix 3.2, Morphix 0.3-x, Red Hat 8.x and 9.x as well as Mandrake 9.x. Not to mention the high failure rate of WD drives!

Western Digital bad!

I have a Western Digital WD1200JB connected to my EPoX 8RDA+ (admittedly it's on an off-board SiI680A-based PCI ATA133 controller card) and I haven't had a scerrick of trouble out of it. I did have some wierd hang issues when I first set Gentoo Linux up on it but that was traced to having ACPI and APIC enabled. Disabling both cleared it up completely. I'm hoping it'll work in 2.6 though, I could really use the IRQ rerouting IO-APIC provides as hopefully it'll get all 3 of my USB2 controllers working properly.

I used to be biased against Western Digital due to experience back in the days where they needed wacky overlay drivers in MS DOS. Since I bought the 80GB SE drive, my opinion of them has improved a lot. They've been the top drive on StorageReview.com for a while now, as well. Unless someone can provide some actual evidence of Western Digital drives having a problem in Linux, I'm not going to consider that as a valid answer, as it really seems like biased rantings at the moment.

I'll try diabling ACPI and APIC and see what happens. It may not be a disk activity problem at all, but simply an IRQ problem. Thanks for the help.

Yeah, mine liked to hang shortly after sound started playing, it could be your SATA controller is doing the same thing, my 8RDA+ doesn't have SATA (which is why I bought it) so I wouldn't know.

Hi all,

This may be a little old BUT:


I myself have a Abit nf7s mainboard and have been using Mandrake linux for some time now (on my old PC).

I installed mandrake 9.2 on my Abit nf7s PC which went ok. However, when I try to copy large files (>200Mb) around it seems to crash completely with nothing except the HDD led glowing and no HDD activity - the screen stays frozen. I am using a Maxtor HDD. I should also mention that when a reset my machine it usually freezes on the HDD integrity check after a bad shutdown in the same way as I stated above.

I have just tried to unstall Mandrake 10 community (2.6 kernel woohoo!) which just does the same crashing during the installer!!

Hope someone can shed light on the subject!

By the way Im sure it has something to do with the disk activity incase anyone is curious


Regards,

joe

I would consider sata/mainboard the issue. Support in Linux is brand new, relative to older ata drives.

Just a note, I have two WD drives with Mandrake, Lindows, Debian and Knoppix on my second system with no trouble. Except for a slow tranfer of large amounts of data from drive to drive, they function very well. One is a 80 gig and the other 120 gigs. Granted they are relatively new, which apparently speaks for an improvement in quality control.

I just had an old 4 gig WD drive fail (the first hard drive to fail on me) after 7 years of use. I consider that a pretty good record.

Greetings,

just can throw in some vague assumptions and thoughts: Try to obtain a "cross-reference"-OS. Something like Knoppix 3.2/3 which boots from the CD and check if you have the same errors occuring. Knoppix has quite neat hardware-detection and chances are good that it could lead you to some settings for lilo.conf/whatever.conf that might help you solve your issues.

I've been fiddling here with MDK10 for a week now or so and as a quick shot I'd recommend a "nolapic"-appendage in lilo.conf in all cases. I tried varies settings there, but running the system without "nolapic" resulted in similar freezes as you described (though - just guessing here as I don't even know what chipset your mobo features). Having "apic=ht" in the append-line and keeping normal "apic" as it is showed no side effects so far.

hope this helps

p.s. just for fun, and while I'm at it: how the smeg do you patch a kernel when you do "patch -p0 < patchfile" and all you get is "file to patch?" - cy

In terms of the patch file, I can think of two things.

1. Make sure the patch file is located in the directory that you are attempting to patch to, such as /usr/src/linux; and that you are cd 'ed into that directory, as you attempt to apply the patch.

2. Assure that the patch is decompressed. In other words, the patch does not have a .gz extention.

To get an idea of what to do, see;

http://www.uni-paderborn.de/Linux/mdw/HOWTO/Kernel-HOWTO-5.html

@danleff
before I get accused of hijacking this thread lemme just say thanx a million for the URL you posted. I followed another tut which stated it should all be done from the /usr/src directory. Could have thought of changing to the right directories myself, doh thanx again.

I've been having BIG problems, and the only thing I can put it down to is my WD HDDs.
To be specific, my non SE WD drives.
I have a Supermicro Dual Tualatin board that I use as my workstation, which has 4 Western Digital 80 GB SE drives in it, have been using Red Hat Linux for umm serveral years, and now Fedora.
Anyways, my workstation works fine - rock solid.

But my server on the other hand has been crashing regularily.

In my servers I use Promie controller cards.
I've got 3 Western Digital 120 GB SE drives, 2 80 GB SE drives.
One 40 GB & one 20 GB non-SE drives. All Western Digital.

I'd been having troubles with my first server, which was an old IBM Netfinity (Dual PII) which I managed to get for nothing. It worked fine to start with, but after a while it started crashing, after 15 - 20 days of uptime. But that 15 - 20 days gradually grew shorter and shorter. When the machine crashed it was a total lock up, nothing was ever written to the logs, it seemed it just froze instantly.

2nd Server MoBo was a Tyan Tiger 100 - Dual slot 1 PIII board.
Crash Crash Crash Crash - every 2 - 5 days.

Next I got hold of a MSI dual FC-PGA motherboard and two PIII 750s. And what do ya know, it crashed, and crashed and chrased. Ya know, I never had that setup up for more than 5 days. Always crashed/locked up before 5 days came around. My server is never to useless.

Right, that was it. I went out and got another Supermicro Dual Tualatin board for my server. A server board, rather than workstation board, though.
I've had the same problem with the Supermicro board, it only stays up for 2 or 3 days.

So, I've done some testing.
I disconnected all disks but the 20GB drive and isntalled Red Hat on it and let it run until it locked up. 2 point something days later the system was down. I tried it again. This time I got closer to 3 days.
So I tried the 40 GB drive by itself.
Exactly the same thing as the 20 GB.
Next I tried one of the 80 GB drives.
After 13 days it was still going. How long should I wait? It might not ever crash again.
I tried it with a 120 GB drive. No crash there after 13 days either.

Basically, I've tried all sorts of combinations of drives.
Non- SE drives working at the same time as SE drives.
OS installed on non-SE drives with SE drives attached.
OS istalled on SE drives with non-SE drives attached.

Anyways, whatever combination of drives I've tried in my server, when ever there is a non-SE drive attached - it will lock up.

All the testing was done on the Supermicro board.

I'm now running all SE drives in my server, and it's still going strong after 52 days.

My conclusion is that the non-SE drives are not to be touched.
Though I still don't understand why it should make a difference.
Any HDD should be able to go for more than 2 or 3 days.
Or the non-SE drives have a problem with Promise controller cards.
Then again, I have tried the drives while connected to the motherboards on board IDE connectors with the same results.