Crash with hard disk errors (ATA exception)

Question

My Arch just crashed displaying in a TTY errors like this:
[ 24.229347] ata2.00: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x1 SErr 0x0 action 0x0
[ 24.229397] ata2.00: irq_stat 0x40000008
[ 24.229426] ata2.00: failed command: READ FPDMA QUEUED
[ 24.229463] ata2.00: cmd 60/08:00:70:3e:c3/00:00:03:00:00/40 tag 0 ncq 4096 in
res 51/40:08:70:3e:c3/00:00:03:00:00/40 Emask 0x409 (media error) <F>
[ 24.229552] ata2.00: status: { DRDY ERR }
[ 24.229579] ata2.00: error: { UNC }
[ 24.234145] ata2.00: configured for UDMA/133
[ 24.234168] sd 1:0:0:0: [sda] Unhandled sense code
[ 24.234171] sd 1:0:0:0: [sda]
[ 24.234173] Result: hostbyte=0x00 driverbyte=0x08
[ 24.234176] sd 1:0:0:0: [sda]
[ 24.234177] Sense Key : 0x3 [current] [descriptor]
[ 24.234181] Descriptor sense data with sense descriptors (in hex):
[ 24.234183] 72 03 11 04 00 00 00 0c 00 0a 80 00 00 00 00 00
[ 24.234192] 03 c3 3e 70
[ 24.234196] sd 1:0:0:0: [sda]
[ 24.234198] ASC=0x11 ASCQ=0x4
[ 24.234200] sd 1:0:0:0: [sda] CDB:
[ 24.234202] cdb[0]=0x28: 28 00 03 c3 3e 70 00 00 08 00
[ 24.234210] end_request: I/O error, dev sda, sector 63127152
[ 24.234261] Buffer I/O error on device dm-1, logical block 7864270
[ 24.234321] ata2: EH complete
I shutdown the laptop by pressing the power button. On the reboot, a lot of these errors displayed but the system booted successfully. Here is the dmsg : http://pastebin.com/FAEAXwwY
It is a 8 months old MSI GT70 laptop which never suffered from mechanical shocks in any way in the past.
Should I get worried about this and start making — full — backups?

Answer 1

The problem seems fixed now, at least I hope so.
If the live CD did not booted this isn't because of the hard drive but of my NVIDIA Optimus config, adding “acpi=off” as kernel parameter fixed that.
In the live CD I was able to open the LUKS volume, activate the LVM VG and mount the LV without any errors or visible problems (such as lags).
Then I launched a “e2fsck -c -c” on the root LV (after unmouting it, of course); it reported 9 errors (9/0/0). I answered “yes” to all questions of e2fsck.
I had the idea to regenerate the initramfs with mkinitcpio as I remembered I have canceled the last mkinitcpio during the process, maybe it generated a corrupted ramfs?
After rebooting, everything worked normally. But I'm afraid I only have a reprieve, I will still clone my disk while it is still readable.
Last edited by Nock441 (2013-12-27 17:59:12)