> Well this harddrive never stops... I've got about 200 lines like these in > the syslog. What exactly do they mean wand what could cause an error like > this? I get the basic jist that something tried to access sectors that > didn't exist. > > Mar 20 01:19:50 server kernel: attempt to access beyond end of device > Mar 20 01:19:50 server kernel: 03:41: rw=0, want=950783358, limit=11773912 > Mar 20 01:19:50 server kernel: attempt to access beyond end of device > Mar 20 01:19:50 server kernel: 03:41: rw=0, want=1514515083, limit=11773912 > Mar 20 01:19:50 server kernel: attempt to access beyond end of device > Mar 20 01:19:50 server kernel: 03:41: rw=0, want=1758954358, limit=11773912 They mean "attempt to access beyond end of device". To put it another way: Something (probably some metadata on the disk, like directory entry or control block) said "the inode you want is at this position", the filesystem said "ok, accessing it now", the device driver said "hey, that's not anywhere on the surface of this disk" And well, it's likely to be caused by damaged meta-information (filesystem structure data) on the disk. I got it on my swap partitions once because of bad RAM chips, though.