HDD problems love me a lot. Now I have my old HDD getting ‘hot – unplug’ events from nowhere. I’ve no idea why that should come in. This ‘unplugging’ causes a momentary freeze and the drive being reset. Googling did not help too much except that I now know people had problems with getting ‘hotplugging’ to work with the nForce sata (sata_nv driver). The resetting happens quite unpredictably. Smartctl says the disk is OK. Now how do we get a ‘hot unplug’ event without unplugging it. Tried moving the cable around (the SATA cables feel a bit loose) dont know if that is going to help. I’ve not heard the ‘reset-clicking’ in windows though which makes me feel that it might not be the hardware. But then it appeared first without any reason when running 2.6.19.2 (which does not give any detail on whats going). 2.6.22.1 tells me that its a hot unplug event that preceds the hard reset. The good part is that you get to do some learning surrounding this. For me the next good thing in sata is the AHCI (well, actually it is here, just not in my home computer though).

Let me know if you can figure out what is happening from this fragment of kern.log:

... Jul 22 15:22:01 localhost kernel ...
15:22:01 ata3: exception Emask 0x10 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x1810000 action 0x2 frozen
15:22:01 ata3: (ADMA status 0x00000502: hot unplug)
15:22:01 ata3: hard resetting port
15:22:07 ata3: port is slow to respond, please be patient (Status 0x80)
15:22:11 ata3: COMRESET failed (errno=-16)
15:22:11 ata3: hard resetting port
15:22:12 ata3: SATA link up 1.5 Gbps (SStatus 113 SControl 300)
15:22:12 ata3.00: configured for UDMA/133
15:22:12 ata3: EH pending after completion, repeating EH (cnt=4)
15:22:12 ata3: EH complete
15:22:12 sd 2:0:0:0: [sda] 156301488 512-byte hardware sectors (80026 MB)
15:22:12 sd 2:0:0:0: [sda] Write Protect is off
15:22:12 sd 2:0:0:0: [sda] Mode Sense: 00 3a 00 00
15:22:12 sd 2:0:0:0: [sda] Write cache: enabled, read cache: enabled,
doesn't support DPO or FUA