mysterious file/disk suck on my powerbook

[substitute]

I get disk I/O errors, which are the computer equivalent of coughing up blood; ominous.

They only happen with certain files. I notice it when syncing to my iPod or listening to music, for example. One music file will be a DEVIL FILE and cause the system to throw the I/O errors into the log after hanging up really badly (slow UI, processes crash, etc).

If I delete that one file then no problems for a while until another DEVIL FILE shows up.

I'm trying to figure out if maybe the iTunes-LAME script I use so I can use the LAME MP3 encoder might be contributing to this, or maybe LAME itself, but I can't see how. Maybe something is messed up with 10.4.3?

Comments

[do-not-lick.livejournal.com]

It sounds to me like one or two physically bad blocks on your hard drive -- you get a problem in a file, delete that file, and then see no more problems until another file decides to use those blocks. I actually don't know of anything else that would cause something like what you're seeing; software errors can cause I/O errors, but generally those would be disk-wide and pretty much fatal, the result of a configuration issue. I've never seen sporadic I/O errors be caused by anything other than physical disk degradation.

I'm not sure how it works in OSX but I know in unix, fsck has a mark-bad-blocks thing, which goes through and tries to read/write every block on your disk, and tells the OS not to use any blocks that are bad.

The only problem is what you mention in the first sentence -- when a hard disk gets one bad block on it, IME it means that it's going to start getting some more. It might not work out that way though -- my general plan when I see stuff like this is to just mark the bad blocks as I see them and start thinking about buying new hardware, but only actually do so once the incidence rate starts really going up.

Backups are a good idea too.