Comment 98 for bug 550559

This problem recently appeared on my Acer Aspire laptop running Ubuntu 11.10 oneiric.
kern.log and syslog are filling up fast with the errors and some commands (grepping through syslog) return IO Errors. Booting and sleeping take longer than usual, but the machine is still usable for network operations.

fsck and smartctl report that the disk is healthy, but I still believe that this is a hardware problem and so have ordered a replacement disk (Western Digital WD3200BEVT-22ZCT0 320GB, 5400).

Here is the lspci:

00:1f.2 SATA controller: Intel Corporation 82801HBM/HEM (ICH8M/ICH8M-E) SATA AHCI Controller (rev 03) (prog-if 01 [AHCI 1.0])
 Subsystem: Acer Incorporated [ALI] Device 0146
 Flags: bus master, 66MHz, medium devsel, latency 0, IRQ 46
 I/O ports at 18d8 [size=8]
 I/O ports at 18cc [size=4]
 I/O ports at 18d0 [size=8]
 I/O ports at 18c8 [size=4]
 I/O ports at 18e0 [size=32]
 Memory at fc304000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=2K]
 Capabilities: [80] MSI: Enable+ Count=1/4 Maskable- 64bit-
 Capabilities: [70] Power Management version 3
 Capabilities: [a8] SATA HBA v1.0
 Kernel driver in use: ahci
 Kernel modules: ahci