ThinkPad Death!
Posted by George Wright Thu, 22 Feb 2007 06:53:00 GMT
Well, it looks like my ThinkPad T43p has decided to die. A few months ago the UltraNav touchpad/trackpoint combination thing decided to start being faulty, in that it would randomly stop working and then only start working again when it felt like it (a reboot didn’t fix the problem, and no mouse was detected by the kernel if I did reboot), which was a pain.
So today I rebooted the laptop and what am I greeted with upon next boot? The following error message splurted out over and over again:
translated ATA stat/err 0x51/40 to SCSI SK/ASC/ASCQ 0x3/11/04
Really not my idea of fun. A hard disk failure - the most annoying thing in the world. Luckily I managed to get the hard disk into a USB caddy and copy the entire home partition off it, but it seems the hard disk really is faulty as dd if=/dev/sdi of=/dev/zero on my desktop (where sdi is the disk) gets the following sent to dmesg:
[19135224.412000] sd 23:0:0:0: SCSI error: return code = 0x8000002
[19135224.412000] sdi: Current: sense key: Medium Error
[19135224.412000] Additional sense: Unrecovered read error
[19135224.412000] end_request: I/O error, dev sdi, sector 61507808
[19135224.412000] Buffer I/O error on device sdi, logical block 7688476
[19135322.864000] sd 23:0:0:0: SCSI error: return code = 0x8000002
[19135322.864000] sdi: Current: sense key: Medium Error
[19135322.864000] Additional sense: Unrecovered read error
[19135322.864000] end_request: I/O error, dev sdi, sector 61507816
[19135322.864000] Buffer I/O error on device sdi, logical block 7688477
Oh the joy. I’ve now contacted Lenovo/IBM to see what they can do for me under warranty, and upon reading the warranty documentation it seems the trackpad and disk drive are customer replacement units so hopefully I won’t even have to send it in! Hooray for sane warranty agreements! :)
The HDD definitely is, but I don’t know about the trackpad. I have an T40 (AFAIK the shell is the same in the entire series) and to exchange the trackpad it’s necessary to open up the machine, and doing that yourself voids the warranty. You can download the hardware maintainance manual for your thinkpad from the IBM website (it takes some searching) and see for yourself. The manual contains some nifty info like how exactly to take apart your thinkpad and part numbers for ordering replacement parts through the IBM webshop.
Hi, something similar happened to me two days ago. Im using Kubuntu Edgy. I got 4 or 5 “translated ATA stat/err 0x51/40 to SCSI SK/ASC/ASCQ 0x3/11/04” followed by “Buffer I/O error on device sdi, logical block ……”. This pattern was repeted a lot of times.
What I did was I booted in “safe mode”. Dunno what that is, but it’s on the kubuntu boot menu. After about 10-15 of the above pattern repeated, I got kicked into console and was told to run fsck without -p and -a or something similar. I did this (“fsck /dev/sda”). fsck asked me a lot for “…. force overwrite? ” questions. I answered yes on every question, and after 30mins or so with hammering the enter (since y is default) butten the disc worked again. :)
Now I get no errors during boot. I still don’t know if the disc is faulty, but I don’t seem to have lost any data. I did however back up my data as soon as the computer was up and running again ;)
After examening my grub’s menu.lst, it was “recovery mode”, not “safe mode”, and the difference is that it boots with parameter “single”. Hope my method works for you too. Data loss is bad :(
Nomar:
The warranty thing states that the trackpad housing is a Tier 2 CRU (Customer Replacable Unit) so I’m hoping that means I can replace it myself.
Skrot:
The disk is definitely dead - dd is about as low level as you can get on the disk and if that’s failing and showing kernel messages stating errors, then I am fairly convinced the disk itself is faulty.
Before you give up getting the data from your dead HD, try dd_rescue
http://www.garloff.de/kurt/linux/ddrescue/
It has saved me once already. I could get data back from an almost dead 250GB drive, and luckily lost only 10 files or so due to the bad sectors.
This might help http://anil.omkar.googlepages.com/disk_recovery