Maxtor and the status=0x59

Pythagoras1 · Posted: Mon Feb 17, 2003 9:37 pm Post subject: Maxtor and the status=0x59

Hi all!

I saw a strange behaviour of my Kernel.
Gentoo is a fresh install on my machine and the Kernel hates it if I turn off the PC (it doesn't matter if I umount root - also after halt and manual power off). It seems that my root partition becomes always damaged when loosing power or if I press Ctrl-Alt-Del to reboot W2k at the begin of it's booting. (strangest!!!)

Pythagoras1 · Posted: Mon Feb 17, 2003 9:59 pm Post subject:

hmmm.... the only jumper on my hard disc is the 'master piece'

)

i'll try to contact dell

Pythagoras1 · Posted: Tue Feb 18, 2003 7:44 pm Post subject:

Unfortunately dell support couldn't solve my problem.

I got the hint to press Ctrl-Alt-D when booting so Dell-Bios performes a check of my drives. My HD 'passed' that check and seemed to work correctly but the error only occurs when switching power off (or the Ctrl-Alt-Del while W2k-boot).

I can remember: I used SuSE for a year, weeks before and my kernel showed me sometimes a message, that the device was NOT cleanly umounted while booting. The SuSE kernel also performed that integrity check which mine does not.

I beleive this is a firmware bug or the HD has a mechanical problem with switching power off - probably there is a cache which didn't write everything at the end.

A workaround that I would accept

is the FS check before the kernel mounts the partition but unfortunately I couldn't find this option. (which seems to be enabled in SuSE and Gentoo-install cd)

PS I mistyped the boot message above. The last line of my output was:
Kernel panic: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on 03:07

DrBile · n00b Joined: 17 Sep 2002 Posts: 1 Location: SW Florida

Wondering if you had any resolution on this.... I am getting similar issues (on install, however) on a 10GB Maxtor drive on a Optiplex G150. I checked jumpers, ran the Dell utility, and played with the kernel configuration (and even completely restarted the installation process, just in case), but still am unable to mount the root filesystem.

Could you outline exactly how you are bringing up your machine with the installation CD? I tried using lilo instead of grub, which would seem to eliminate the bootloader as the problem. (Since the kernel was booting, one would expect that the bootloader was not to blame, in any case)

It must be something between the kernel and the drive (DMA issues?) I am not an expert in such things.

Thanks,

Brent

"Regime change starts at home"

blubber · Posted: Sun Mar 30, 2003 1:37 am Post subject:

I just installed a fresh copy of gentoo on a new mainboard, and now my maxtor 30gb is giving the same errors. PowerMax, maxtors diag tool reports no errors... Is there someone who knows how to solve this iritating problem?

procrustes · n00b Joined: 14 Jun 2002 Posts: 13

Now I'm having the same problem, on a brand new IBM T40 Thinkpad, with essentially the same error message. This is a standard install, and I've tried booting with vanilla and gentoo sources for the kernel. The LiveCD 1.4_rc4 works just fine, no problems, and reiserfsck (I'm using reiserfs) reports no errors. Has anyone else had/fixed this problem, especially with a laptop?

procrustes · n00b Joined: 14 Jun 2002 Posts: 13

Well, I found my problem. Maybe this will help someone else. It's a really stupid mistake. In my partition table, my / partition was listed as Linux swap and my swap partition was listed as Linux. Switched those, and things worked perfectly. Now to get everything else working...

Pythagoras1 · Posted: Mon Jul 21, 2003 10:54 pm Post subject:

I don't think that I made a related mistake, but if it helps out, here's my partition table:

procrustes · n00b Joined: 14 Jun 2002 Posts: 13

One final update:

As noted above, my problem disappeared after repartitioning the hard drive. What I did not mention was that I also reduced the size of the linux partition. This evidently just removed the bad sectors from circulating.

Several months later (yesterday), I started getting the same errors suddenly (with no changes to my system). About an hour or two after that, my hard drive was completely unreadable or writable. Reading the partition table, which the kernel does every time you boot, generated those errors and a kernel panic. Sigh.

Almost every thread on these forums which mentions problems like this ended up concluding a hardware problem. It seems they were right. Now that I have a new hard drive everything works perfectly and I have full use of my disk space.

blamothe · Posted: Thu Jan 08, 2004 2:35 am Post subject: think i solved it

i was having the same problem on a new ibm laptop, and after running every hardrive test imaginable, i was pretty sure it wasn't the drive. what you want to enable is auto geometry resizing under ide 2 disk support in ata/ide/.... support in the kernel config. the problem for me, i didn't think ibm would still use an award bios with a 40 gig drive, but i guess they do. hope this helps others out there.

Pythagoras1 · Posted: Tue Feb 10, 2004 11:51 am Post subject: Re: think i solved it

kuemmel · Posted: Mon May 31, 2004 10:39 am Post subject:

blamothe: thank you so much. after digging through the forum i was getting nervous about my disc. your hint saved me A LOT of time. thank you very much.

is there a way to get this hint more public ? I think a lot of people in this forum suffer "SectorIdNotFound"-problems

greetings Joachim