The Open Source Journal

Quite often you run into new problems that don't have an immediate and clear solution. Generally these errors appear as cryptic lines in dmesg, who's subsequent googling reveals little to no detail of the true issue. This time, it was some lines concerning my hard drives (which always raise concern). It can be frustrating solving problems that seemingly no one else has encountered, but it's part of every IT person's job. Perhaps I should make this a weekly column...

Lately, my personal file server (which operates in the comfort of my closet) started showing errors in dmesg. Since this single machine and a collection of DVDs hold my entire digital existence, I naturally started to worry. Ignoring problems like this always leads to deep, deep regrets (and long nights recovering data) down the line.

The error message was as follows:

I get scared when I see "media error" in my dmesg output. But googling for media error is going to be a lesson in futility; so instead I go with "bmdma", of which I had never heard until now. After reading about bmdma and it's apparent...irrelevance...I locked on to "bmdma stat 0x24" which yielded a bundle of information.

The end result was this page on the ubuntu forums which, after diligent troubleshooting efforts on their part, forum members determined the problem was SATA cables.

SATA cables and I go back. Way back. In fact, we've spent probably $500 dollar on cables in the last three years, replacing faulty and failing cables (although the errors there were more obvious). So I wasn't too surprised when the resolution to this problem was miraculously simple - a quick replacement cable for /dev/sdb, and bam - no more exceptions!