Hard Drive Error : ata3.00: status: { DRDY ERR }

[ricardisimo]

My secondary drive disappeared, and I was getting the same status error, so I tried hobong's fix... and now I have no drives at all, and cannot get past the initramfs command line screen. Curiously, when I run "ls /etc/modprobe.d" the file I created does not appear any longer. Has it been auto-deleted? Were its contents absorbed into some other conf file?

Any help undoing this would be greatly appreciated. Music files and stuff like that can be replaced, but my work files are way too much work to replace.

[azeam]

Long post with no solutions but here are some of my experiences with this problem (ata3.00 DRDY...) on a Fujitsu Siemens Esprimo v5535 laptop, I assume this doesn't apply to everyone having these problems but perhaps it can keep some of you from throwing the hard drive out of the window thinking that it's dead at least.

The story starts with the original hard drive (120gb sata), Ubuntu crashed during installation (while writing the MBR) and I haven't been able to boot the drive since then. Makes sense.

Bought an ssd drive and started getting strange errors, sometimes it booted fine, sometimes BIOS couldn't find it, sometimes these DRDY errors appeared etc. I did some research and came to the conclusion that the laptop simply doesn't support ssd drives and no BIOS updates are ever going to come for this old laptop. Sold the ssd drive and the drive works fine in another computer.

Bought a used 60gb drive which made a bit of "old hard drive" noise already when I got it but it has been working with the exception of two crashes in about two months, works again after formatting it though.

Got a new laptop, installed an ssd drive in that and put the unused drive (500gb) that came with the new laptop in my old laptop (the Fujitsu). Installed Ubuntu (Maverick) without problems, rebooted and got ata3.00 DRDY errors. Tried basically everything I could think of and reformatted/installed a couple of times but they kept coming (somewhat randomly) during boot. Fsck from live cd gave the message that the superblock was bad and backup superblock couldn't be used. Even tried installing Windows XP, installation went fine but I got a blue screen during the first boot. Under normal circumstances I would probably have given up on the drive but because of the previous problems and the fact that the drive was completely new I figured that it was very unlikely for the drive to be "DOA". So I put this 500gb drive back in to my new laptop and it works fine.

I'm not sure what causes these errors in the Fujitsu laptop but as far as I can understand it could be because of a bad power supply to the hard drive. It makes sense because the ssd and the 500gb should need more power than the smaller 60gb which works (a lot better at least). It could also be because of the lack of AHCI support in BIOS, perhaps the newer drives require AHCI to function properly? Or simply a crap motherboard/IDE controller? The last option (as I see it) would be a connection issue, I've tried cleaning the sata connection and it makes no difference, and to me it doesn't make sense that the 60gb works and the others don't. Still, I don't understand why the OS installations work...

[M4rotku]

Ok, I tried the recommended solution, but it still does the same thing. It doesn't start up, and when I brought up the command prompt with alt + ctrl + f1, it gave me the same error message as everyone has been getting.

Is anyone else still getting this problem after the added 'options' file? and are there any other potential solutions/updates coming?

[Ddorda]

That error appears to me on a fresh installation of Ubuntu 11.04.
Tried the suggested solution but it didn't helped and it seems like i still get the same errors.

Ideas? Thanks!

[hkenneth]

I have exactly the same issue as you do. This is my new rig, and Windows works perfectly fine. Mac OS X 10.7 GM (osx86) works too. So this could not be a hardware problem.

Actually, when I install my Ubuntu without Internet connection (to avoid it download updates), the system worked well. But after I updated the system today, the annoying DRDY ERR appeared again. If I use the old kernel, I can boot into the system, but the system frequently got freeze when reading/writing files, and finally dead so I had to do a cold reboot.

[tech_ninja]

I had the exact same error too, but plugging the HDD on to a different port on the motherboard seems to work. It's been running 2 days without any errors.

[OCedHrt]

Not intending to thread hijack, so let me know if I should create a new one. But it seems all the experts are already here.

I have been trying to recover data off of a failing HD using ddrescue and all that remains is about 9000KB of affected earlier. ddrescue has yet to confirm weather all of this is bad and is now reading through it sector by sector.

9071 KB　/ 512 byte/sector = 18142 sectors. That doesn't sound so bad until you find out it's going very slowly. Checking /var/log/syslog indicates that each sector read attempt is being retried 6 times!

My ddrescue command: ddrescue -d -f -v /dev/sdb /dev/sdc ./dd.log

I can include syslog if that is useful but what I can confirm is that leading up to each "end_request: I/O error, dev sdb, sector xxxxxxxxx" there are 6 "ata3.00: failed command: READ DMA" entries, each with it's own "ata3: EH complete"

When you do the math, at 18142 sectors * 30 seconds/sector we get 6.3 days!!

I tried setting the block device timeout to 5 seconds from 30 seconds but this just causes each READ DMA to timeout and the ahci driver does the 6 retries anyways, but this time each cycling the ATA link resulting in even longer reads per sector.

Is there a way to turn off the libata/ahci retry completely? I tried searching and read about several experiences but the closest I got was the command timeout and a dismissive response that libata does not retry. Btw, the code for libata seems to mention that there is indeed retry on command failure.

[josuelopes]

It's Kernel bug on ata acpi
Put "options libata noacpi=1" on /etc/modprobe.d/options
solved the problem

I have the same problem and its annoying please tell me what do i have to input in the terminal (the exact words) to solve thi thing? I dont know if it matters but i tried to find the "options" file with command ls and it doesn't find it...

[overdrank]

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