[bassetman]

Hi

When I booted up my Lycoris Linux today I saw Starting Network and below it with some other stuff it said illegal seek error 300019.

I haven't been able to see the Linux box for awhile now, but I have not noticed that error until today.

Anyone able to offer me any help on this?

Thanks
John

[codejockey]

Well, this may not end up being any help at all, but at least it's worth a shot ...

The "illegal seek error" suggests that your hard drive may either be partitioned incorrectly (perhaps specifying a location that is unreachable) or configured improperly in the BIOS (Maxtor, for example, publishes the maximum LBA value and warns against exceeding it -- which you can do if you tweak the BIOS disk parameters properly ...). Barring either of these two possibilities, I'd suggest treating it as a seek error, and perhaps a warning that your hard drive may need a low-level format. Since you're running Linux, you might also try a couple of things:

(1) enable S.M.A.R.T. if your drive supports it; typically, you can get a report of the drive status using a command such as: smartctl -a /dev/hdXXX, where XXX refers to the drive (e.g., hda, hdb, etc.). This may help you to identify problems the drive is having.

(2) verify the partition configuration by using fdisk; try fdisk /dev/hdXXX at the command line, where XXX is the drive identifier (e.g., hda, hdb, etc.) and choose the 'v' (verify) option. Review any errors reported.

Hope this helps.

[bassetman]

Thanks, I'll look into that stuff!