I'm not sure if it'd be something worse, but I'd guess that it is; Your disk is telling the controller that something's failing its diagnostic check (whatever component 85h is; if you look around the vendor's site for whoever made your hard drive they might have a white paper or API or something that'll tell you what component 85h is). First thing is to back up data, then I'd give fsck a shot. Based on the I/O error you mentioned, I'm skeptical that that'll work, but it's worth a shot; if you have a vendor-supplied diagnostic disk or utility, that would be the best thing to do after backing up your data (noticing a theme?). My guess is that a component on the hard drive has failed, and the drive would need to be repaired or replaced. Sorry to be the interpreter of potentially bad news. -- Michael Vieths Foeclan at Winternet.Com On Tue, 15 May 2001 andy at theasis.com wrote: > > > > Byte two of your Sense Data is the Sense Key (0x02, Not Ready). Sense Code > > and Qualifier of 40 and 85 is Diagnostic Failure (40) on component 85 > > (presumably something in your disk, that part's vendor specific). I'd > > recommend backing up any useful data you've got and running whatever > > diagnostics you might have for the disk; it looks like it's hardware. > > You're talking diagnostics from the disk or controller? Or more along the > lines of e2fsck? (I'm afeared that you're talking something a bit more > serious than a simple fsck). > > Sorry to be slow (it's denial). > > Andy