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