Bug 2687

Summary: Write Cache FAILED Flushing of hda
Product: IO/Storage Reporter: Soos Gergely (sogerc1)
Component: IDEAssignee: Bartlomiej Zolnierkiewicz (bzolnier)
Status: REJECTED DUPLICATE    
Severity: high    
Priority: P2    
Hardware: i386   
OS: Linux   
Kernel Version: 2.6.6 Subsystem:
Regression: --- Bisected commit-id:

Description Soos Gergely 2004-05-11 15:43:31 UTC
Distribution:
Slackware 9.0 with lots of replaced parts

Hardware Environment:
Maxtor 120GB Hard Drive. `dmesg|grep hda:' looks like:
ide0: BM-DMA at 0xfc00-0xfc07, BIOS settings: hda:DMA, hdb:pio
hda: Maxtor 6Y120P0, ATA DISK drive
hda: max request size: 128KiB
hda: 240121728 sectors (122942 MB) w/7936KiB Cache, CHS=65535/16/63, UDMA(133)
 hda: hda1 hda2 hda4 < hda5 hda6 hda7 >
hda: task_no_data_intr: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
hda: task_no_data_intr: error=0x04 { DriveStatusError }
hda: Write Cache FAILED Flushing!

Software Environment:
Linux kernel v2.6.6

Problem Description:
I am worried about the last three lines. With the kernel version 2.6.5 this
message did not appear.
The message appears with every boot, but I never waited for the message to
appear again, because
I was afraid to loose data.
When I restart the system after the shutdown script appears at about 10-20 lines
of error message,
which I can't read or save, because it dissapears with the BIOS boot.

Another issue is that before every computer restart the harddrive is spinned
down, which I find
useless, and even hurtful, because the harddrive is restarted in just a couple
of seconds by the BIOS.
It is OK in a case of a powerdown, but not when rebooting.
Comment 1 Dan Noe 2004-05-11 18:08:24 UTC
I also have this problem, also with a Maxtor disk.  Problem was not present
under 2.6.5, appears during boot time only.  Cursory research seems to indicate
that the problem is due to Linux misunderstanding the drive's capabilities and
trying a command on it which fails.  I have another harddisk (Western Digital)
in the same machine and bus and it doesn not have any messages printed for it.

hda: Maxtor 6Y080P0, ATA DISK drive
hdb: WDC WD1600JB-00FUA0, ATA DISK drive
[snip]
hda: 160086528 sectors (81964 MB) w/7936KiB Cache, CHS=65535/16/63, UDMA(133)
 /dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0: p1 p2 p3 p4
hda: task_no_data_intr: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
hda: task_no_data_intr: error=0x04 { DriveStatusError }
hda: Write Cache FAILED Flushing!

The last three lines are repeated later many times, then stop right before the
root fs is mounted.  They have not occured at any other time so far.

Distribution: Gentoo
Kernel: 2.6.6-mm1
Comment 2 Bartlomiej Zolnierkiewicz 2004-05-12 10:39:08 UTC

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 2672 ***