[Oberon] Reason for 'read pio error' ?

[Andreas Dörr]

First of all, I want to congratulate everyone involved in the development 
of Bluebottle for coming up with such a great and promising system! I also 
appreciate, that the source code has been released under a respected open 
source licence.

I have successfully installed Bluebottle on a Dell Inspiron 7500.

Currently I use a 5GB partition for Bluebottle. While trying to format a 
second 5GB partition with AosFS I got an error '2820' at lba 12991229.

Some source code reading revealed the origin of that error code. It comes 
from the procedure "ReadPIO", which is part of module "AosATADisk". "2820" 
means "pio read error". As I understand it, the pio protocol is used to 
communicate with the hard disk.

Does anyone know what is a typical reason for such an error? My first guess 
was a bad block on the hard disk. However, a modern IDE hard disk (it is an 
IBM-DARA-218000) should handle bad blocks at the hardware layer. For 
example with something like transparent bad block swapping.

The only workaround I currently know is to define a small partition that 
includes the conspicuous block. This partition will not be used. Since the 
number of partitions is limited this is not a very good workaround :-(

Kind regards,
--Andreas