Very much so, yes.
At best, all disk access will hang for a while and then resume after the
reset has worked out - this often happens a couple of times per day now.
At worst, the reset will not work and the disk is remounted read-only
and I can sort of use the system a bit this way. It seems somewhat
random how much still works: Up until today I could at least always use
dmesg and tail various logs to try to hunt down what happened, but this
morning dmesg could not be found and I got I/O errors when accessing
anything in /var/log. Rebooting helped as usual.
This fatal variant has happened about every second day lately.
The first two weeks I had the system showed nothing at all like this: I
have log files since July 26 and the first recorded (reset-able) glitch
is from Aug 16. Obviously, any non-resetable problem would have been
easy to spot.
Yes, I would not point fingers to the ICH8 chipset either: The other
MacBookPro I have experimented with now is a 2,2 (ATI based) and has
ICH7, but I'm 99.9% sure my previous MacBookPro 3,1 (nvidia based) was
ICH8 and it worked flawlessly (I saw no reason to swap for the 4,1
version, but it was stolen from me in June). As far as I know the
significant differences with my current MBP are just: higher screen
resolution, multitouch ("iphone") touchpad and more memory. Alas, I
didn't keep a lshw dump.
I'll just clarify that the errno after "revalidation failed" is not
always -5. When it ends up fatal I've also seen -3 and possibly
something else too. I would have taken a screen shot this morning if
only dmesg had worked. :-(
For the record: My current theory is that it is some kind of hardware
problem - either in the disk or on the motherboard so I have persuaded
my local AppleStore to swap the harddisk on Monday and then they will
run their full hardware stress test (4+ hours according to him). The
stress test was apparently suggested from the central repair people (who
have no idea I run Linux on it - the local techie knows, but has no
problem with it as long as I keep a small OSX partition) so I guess this
sort of hints that they are aware of hardware issues.
(Note: I've had the same techie replace a broken motherboard in the past
when the Linux messages where at least as clear as the OSX ones - in
that case drives would in the end only show up in the boot menue when
the system had cooled down for at least 20 minutes. To be on the safe
side, I've upped the minimum fan speed by 50% to ensure all sensors give
me happy readings all the time - luckily the 4,1 fans are very silent
compared to the 2,2)
I hope to have everything back in shape on Wednesday and I'll let you
know how it fares.
BTW: For a while I displayed the hddtemp sensor all the time along with
coretemp etc, but I now understand that this is also SMART based so I've
turned it off in the past weeks experimentation. Again, it seemed to
work flawlessly for months on my previous (stolen) MBP 3,1.
Best / Jonas
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