# fdisk hangs on SATA drive

## coplaniuk

I have been trying to troubleshoot a RAID 1 issue, for some reason it keeps giving me errors that /dev/md1 doesn't exist.  So during my troubleshooting, I tried to run fdisk on both of the involved drives (/dev/sda and /dev/sdb).  Here, when I try to do an fdisk on /dev/sdb, it hangs indefinitely.  But fdisk on /dev/sda doesn't give me any problems.  

I recently upgraded my system which also upgraded udev, but that could just be a coincidence.  

dmesg is spitting out errors like this if I try to mount /dev/sdb1 (Yes, I know I can't technically mount it in this way, but wanted to see what kind of error I would get):

 *Quote:*   

> 
> 
> ata2: command 0x25 timeout, stat 0xd0 host_stat 0x1
> 
> ata2: translated ATA stat/err 0xd0/00 to SCSI SK/ASC/ASCQ 0xb/47/00
> ...

 

How do I go about troubleshooting /dev/sdb?  What type of issues would cause a hang like that?

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## Kingmilo

Quite frankly bad sectors, i would replace the drive immediately.

Maybe 

```
# emerge smartmontools
```

 then 

```
# smartctl -h 
```

to get a list of test you can perform on your hardrive if it is SMART enabled.

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