# Two problems unsolved currently...



## YZMSQ (Aug 3, 2011)

Hello, there:
Well, I bump into two tiny problems recently, and am not sure about the reason. Yesterday, I tried to deinstall some packages via "pkg_delete", everything is fine except the message shown like this on console:

```
ad5: TIMEOUT - WRITE_DMA RETRYING (1 RETRYING LEFT LBA = 87046335)
```
I don't know what does this mean. Do I have a broken DMA or hard disk? x(
And secondly, I failed to shutdown my computer sometimes. When I press the "Shutdown" button in Xfce 4.8, it'll sometimes (not too often) hang or cease on this message:

```
acpi0: powering system off
```
I've to reboot my box manually, after which... Uh, "Shutdown" works fine for me.
So, is there anything wrong on my box? Could you help me? Thank you in advance. :f


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## SirDice (Aug 3, 2011)

YZMSQ said:
			
		

> everything is fine except the message shown like this on console:
> 
> ```
> ad5: TIMEOUT - WRITE_DMA RETRYING (1 RETRYING LEFT LBA = 87046335)
> ...


It's possible you have bad sectors on the disk. If that's the case the drive will need to be replaced.


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## YZMSQ (Aug 3, 2011)

SirDice said:
			
		

> It's possible you have bad sectors on the disk. If that's the case the drive will need to be replaced.


Thank you for your reply. It sounds horrible if my disk suffers bad sector really. So, will fsck help me handle or remit this issue to some extent?


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## SirDice (Aug 3, 2011)

Fsck will only handle filesystem issues, not these unfortunately. And if there are bad sectors you really need to replace the drive. Normally bad sectors are remapped to a spare bit of disk and you will never notice them. Once they start showing up it means that spare bit is full and you will start seeing more and more bad sectors. If the drive is still under warranty it will be replaced without problems.

I've been looking for a simple tool a la MS-DOS' chkdsk.exe but never found anything like it. 
You could try this though:

```
dd if=/dev/ad5 of=/dev/null
```
This will read the entire disk, if there are errors you should see a lot more messages like the one you already had.

Another option is to install sysutils/smartmontools and look at the SMART data.


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## YZMSQ (Aug 3, 2011)

SirDice said:
			
		

> Fsck will only handle filesystem issues, not these unfortunately. And if there are bad sectors you really need to replace the drive. Normally bad sectors are remapped to a spare bit of disk and you will never notice them. Once they start showing up it means that spare bit is full and you will start seeing more and more bad sectors. If the drive is still under warranty it will be replaced without problems.
> 
> I've been looking for a simple tool a la MS-DOS' chkdsk.exe but never found anything like it.
> You could try this though:
> ...


I will try it later to see what's wrong with my lovely disk.:e
The disk has served me almost five years, so maybe it's time to replace it. And thank you for your help.:f


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