HSM violation

[Tony Alfrey]

Lonni J Friedman wrote:
> On Jan 23, 2008 2:21 AM, Tony Alfrey <tonyalfrey at earthlink.net> wrote:
>> Lonni J Friedman wrote:
>>> Anyone here know how to translate ATA errors?  My wife's laptop spewed
>>> the following about 24 hours ago, although it seems to be
>>> asymptomatic:
>>>
>>> ata2.00: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x0 action 0x2 frozen
>>> ata2.00: cmd a0/00:00:00:00:20/00:00:00:00:00/a0 tag 0 cdb 0x0 data 0
>>>          res 51/20:03:00:00:20/00:00:00:00:00/a0 Emask 0x3 (HSM violation)
<snip>
>>>
>> A Google search on SATA hard drive HSM violation gives many hits on
>> exactly this error message, often on kernels newer than 2.6.18, with
>> inconsistent random solutions (fsck, bad sectors, bad controller,
>> mumbling about possible kernel bugs) but several indicate disk firmware
>> problems (some specifically on Western Digital drives, but also seen on
>> Seagate Barracuda).
> 
> I should have noted that I went to google before posting here, 

I was sure that you did.  But Google searches can give strange results.

> and the
> problem is that there are a ton of hits, but no conclusive answers,
> and even less information on how to decode the spew.  

Exactly

> FWIW, the disk
> in question for me is Hitachi.

Even more uncertainty.

> 
> As for why this appears in google on 2.6.18 and newer kernels, I
> believe that's roughly when the libATA stuff was mainlined in the
> kernel.

Now there is no uncertainty that you know more about this stuff than I. 
  But in my most-used old SuSE distro with an old 2.6.4.X kernel (for 
which I had to load the sata-sil driver) I don't see this sort of 
message with Seagate SATA drives.

But this
http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Problems_with_SATA_and_Linux
clearly says that one needs 2.6.16 kernel or later.

There are many out there that will be interested when you figure it out.


-- 
Tony Alfrey
tonyalfrey at earthlink.net
"I'd Rather Be Sailing"