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Full Discussion: Wrong BIOS IDE Settings on a SATA disk (AHCI)?
Special Forums Hardware Filesystems, Disks and Memory Wrong BIOS IDE Settings on a SATA disk (AHCI)? Post 302305419 by septima.pars on Wednesday 8th of April 2009 11:06:30 PM
Old 04-09-2009
Wrong BIOS IDE Settings on a SATA disk (AHCI)?
Hello,

I wanted to share an experience I had today which was quite a learning experience and perhaps useful for others who may run into the issue at some point in the future.


Basically, the scenario involves a OS which was installed on a machine which hardware-wise, had a SATA Drive. The web server Apache for this machine had earlier crashed a website. The machine I could confirm from a remote location was still operational (i.e. responding to ping attempts)

Taking a monitor/keyboard to the location of the server and subsequently plugging in a monitor, I noticed the logs were flooded with messages to the like of:


backlog limit exceeded
backlog limit exceeded
backlog limit exceeded
backlog limit exceeded
backlog limit exceeded
... ... ...



(which maybe points to a hard drive which may be failing.)

Trying next to login, the machine was unresponsive therefore I rebooted.
Next, I was able to console in as root, and noticed that certain log messages were flooding my shell session. They were similiar to the following:


hda failure rewrite_ext
reset succesful
hda failure rewrite_ext
reset succesful
hda failure rewrite_ext
reset succesful
hda failure rewrite_ext
hda failure rewrite_ext
... ... ...


I then had to switch to another console via Ctrl+Alt+F2/F3 to attempt to restart or at least check the status of the Apache service httpd.

I then had more messages which were flooding even my logged in sessions which I had never seen before. (No prompt and no way to enter commands)

____________________


In anycase, I came to the conclusion after searching a bit on google, is that perhaps the backlogs were flooding the hard drive and causing a DoS, which then maybe caused Apache to stop running.

Also searching google, I noticed that certain BIOS settings may contribute to this behavior, as the machine had no IDE drives, only SATA drives yet somehow the settings were entered incorrectly or not changed to "Enhanced" with a particular setting. (AHCI?)

Some of my colleagues thought the hard drive suspect of failing. Just an interesting experience.................... : )
 

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LEARN ABOUT DEBIAN

hd

HD(4)							     Linux Programmer's Manual							     HD(4)

NAME

       hd - MFM/IDE hard disk devices

DESCRIPTION

       The  hd*  devices  are block devices to access MFM/IDE hard disk drives in raw mode.  The master drive on the primary IDE controller (major
       device number 3) is hda; the slave drive is hdb.  The master drive of the second controller (major device number 22) is hdc and	the  slave
       hdd.

       General	IDE block device names have the form hdX, or hdXP, where X is a letter denoting the physical drive, and P is a number denoting the
       partition on that physical drive.  The first form, hdX, is used to address the whole drive.  Partition numbers are assigned  in	the  order
       the  partitions	are  discovered,  and only nonempty, nonextended partitions get a number.  However, partition numbers 1-4 are given to the
       four partitions described in the MBR (the "primary" partitions), regardless of whether they are unused or extended.  Thus, the first  logi-
       cal  partition  will be hdX5.  Both DOS-type partitioning and BSD-disklabel partitioning are supported.	You can have at most 63 partitions
       on an IDE disk.

       For example, /dev/hda refers to all of the first IDE drive in the system; and /dev/hdb3 refers to the third DOS "primary" partition on  the
       second one.

       They are typically created by:

	      mknod -m 660 /dev/hda b 3 0
	      mknod -m 660 /dev/hda1 b 3 1
	      mknod -m 660 /dev/hda2 b 3 2
	      ...
	      mknod -m 660 /dev/hda8 b 3 8
	      mknod -m 660 /dev/hdb b 3 64
	      mknod -m 660 /dev/hdb1 b 3 65
	      mknod -m 660 /dev/hdb2 b 3 66
	      ...
	      mknod -m 660 /dev/hdb8 b 3 72
	      chown root:disk /dev/hd*

FILES

       /dev/hd*

SEE ALSO

       chown(1), mknod(1), sd(4), mount(8)

COLOPHON

       This  page is part of release 3.44 of the Linux man-pages project.  A description of the project, and information about reporting bugs, can
       be found at http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/.

Linux								    1992-12-17								     HD(4)
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