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thonixx
Asked: 2012-03-02 11:18:46 +0800 CST

Mysterious Hard Disk Failure?

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My new 1,5 TB ext4 Hard Disk makes mysterious noises and fails to read and write. But not always. Sometimes it just works. But then I get those following errors. Does anyone know a solution for that or is my new WD Caviar Black 1.5 TB hard disk broken?

[  551.162286] ata7: SATA link down (SStatus 0 SControl 310)
[  551.162294] ata7.00: link offline, clearing class 1 to NONE
[  551.178223] ata7: EH complete
[  551.190802] ata7: exception Emask 0x10 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x4040000 action 0xe frozen
[  551.190807] ata7: irq_stat 0x00000040, connection status changed
[  551.190811] ata7: SError: { CommWake DevExch }
[  551.190818] ata7: limiting SATA link speed to 1.5 Gbps
[  551.190822] ata7: hard resetting link

Update Mainboard P7P55D LE: http://www.asus.de/Motherboards/Intel_Socket_1156/P7P55D_LE/#specifications

disk sata

4 Answers

  1. That SATA error is not good, but can only really be diagnosed by trying the following:

    • pop this disk in another box
    • put another disk in this box

    That will narrow it down. If the disk still fails in the other box, try and get the data off it if it gives you some uptime, then ditch it

    If the other disk fails in your computer, it is the SATA card, replace it (or if SATA is on the motherboard - you'll need to look at replacing the motherboard)

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  2. Best Answer

    Buy a new one, its broken. Now I hope everything works fine. Update the second one worked for 6 days and now it is broken again. I will exchange it for a new model and hope for a little bit luck.

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  3. Cause: SATA II hard drives use autospeed negotiation. This enables our SATA II drives to automatically detect the motherboard data transfer rate, making it backward compatible with SATA I data transfer rates. However, some older SATA I controllers are unable to support autospeed negotiation and cannot recognize the drive. This “drive not detected” condition occurs when a chipset is incapable of correctly negotiating the data transfer speed with a SATA II hard drive.

    To lock the drive at 150 MB/s data transfer rate install a jumper shunt on pins 5-6 (OPT1), shown in the picture below. (Only available on 3.5 inch (Desktop) size drives) enter image description here

    From: http://wdc.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/search/1/a_id/1337/c/130/p/227,279

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  4. I hope this helps someone out - this immediately solved my problem.

    If you are using a desktop computer, open it up and disconnect your DVD/CD drive. After doing this it booted up without incident. Just to make sure, I also booted into compatible mode from the GUI settings.

    I wanted to clarify. I had read multiple forums over the net. With the 'compatibility mode' from the GUI setting and adding additional parameters, nothing appeared to be working after getting the ata7: hard resetting link. Now that I have finally loaded Linux Mint Cinnamon for the first time, I am installing it and will update this thereafter.

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