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Unfortunately certain models of Gigabyte motherboards play very nasty tricks with your hard disks — entirely without your permission — by setting up Host Protected Areas. These unauthorised modifications to your hard disk can cause the loss of hundreds of Gigabytes of data. Personally I lost a 1.2TB RAID 0 array. [1]

I do not know which models of Gigabyte motherboards are affected but the Gigabyte GA-MA74GM-S2H certainly is; according to this post on opensolaris.org, the GA-G31M-S2L is also affected. If anybody else has experienced this, please post a comment.

The Host Protected Area means that a certain area of the disk is reserved. That’s not too bad on a disk that has never been used in another system. You lose a few tens of megabytes, which isn’t too significant on disks of hundreds of gigabytes. However, if the system has already been used in another system, and contains a partition table or is part of a RAID array, or LVM volume, your data will not be accessible and will essentially be lost.

I unfortunately discovered this problem myself when I upgraded my home Linux-based home fileserver. I upgraded from an Asus motherboard. I had four 300GB IDE disks that had been part of a RAID 0 array (yes, I know about the data loss implications of RAID 0; they’re acceptable for my use). I discovered that Linux’s md could not reassemble two of the disks back into the RAID array. The other two were fine — these were connected to a Promise IDE controller. As the disks were around four years old and had been on 24×7 for that time, I came to the conclusion — although unlikely — that both of the disks had died simultaneously.

Hindsight is a wonderful thing. Unfortunately I had never had any prior experience of Host Protected Areas. However, whilst debugging, I should have noticed the following:

hde: max request size: 512KiB
hde: Host Protected Area detected.
 current capacity is 586070255 sectors (300067 MB)
 native  capacity is 586072368 sectors (300069 MB)
hde: Host Protected Area disabled.
hde: 586072368 sectors (300069 MB) w/8192KiB Cache, CHS=36481/255/63, UDMA(100)
hde: cache flushes supported
 hde: hde1 hde2
hdg: max request size: 512KiB
hdg: Host Protected Area detected.
 current capacity is 586112591 sectors (300089 MB)
 native  capacity is 586114704 sectors (300090 MB)
hdg: Host Protected Area disabled.
hdg: 586114704 sectors (300090 MB) w/16384KiB Cache, CHS=36483/255/63, UDMA(100)
hdg: cache flushes supported
 hdg: hdg1 hdg2

Unfortunately the motherboard, without my permission, was denying md access to part of the disk, meaning that md could not assemble it into the RAID array. Data loss bugs are some of the the worst kind of bugs and I find this behaviour of this motherboard rude and entirely unacceptable.

For me, this wasn’t terrible. Most of the data was backed up to tape, and thus restorable, and what wasn’t, was easily replaceable. But I hope that this post helps someone that thinks that they have lost their data, and encourages Gigabyte to change the unacceptable behaviour of their motherboards.

[1] Sure, using RAID 0 dramatically increases the risk of data loss, and that was acceptable to me as it was personal use, not business critical, and I was happy with the possiblity of a disk dieing. I’m not happy with the fact that Gigabyte hardware behaves in unexpected and totally different ways to all of the (considerable quantity of) other hardware that I’ve used.

Can’t Gordon Brown do anything right? As a result of the security arrangements for Gordon Brown and Nicholas Sarkozy, and the complete incompetence of the French police, hundreds of people, including D-day veterans themselves were trapped in a car park in Arromanches, Normandy, for nearly two-and-a-half hours, without toilets, food, drink, and any idea about when they would be able to get out.

I am currently visiting Normandy for the 65h Anniversary of D-Day. Today — being the 6th of June — marks the exact day that it happened 65 years ago. I decided to spend the day in Arromanches, a town that bears the marks of the invasion to this very day, with the remains of the Mulberry harbours punctuating the horizon across the open sea of the English Channel.

As I drove from the campsite this morning to Arromanches, a distance of around 60 miles, I was struck by the huge number of police everyday, on all of the motorway bridges. After an utterly fantastic day in Arromanches seeing the veterans, and looking at a British Army landing craft on the beach, and a vast number of army vehicles including Jeeps and trucks, the time came to go home.

I returned to my car at 5pm, but just as I went to leave, the entrances to the car park were suddenly closed, without warning, by the French police (Gendarmerie). We were initially told that this would be for around 20 minutes whilst the convoys of Gordon Brown and Nicholas Sarkozy went past into the town. Very annoying, but tolerable.

What actually happened was that the road was closed, road blocks were implemented, and hundreds of vehicles (including modern cars, camper vans as well as veteran military vehicles) and hundreds, if not thousands of people were trapped in the car park, a field, a short distance from the beach at Arromanches. For just short of two-and-a-half hours. This was for the time that it took the convoys to get to Arromanches, Brown and Sarkozy to make themselves look important, and to finally leave.

Not only were there those interested in history, like myself, but also D-Day veterans themselves. I was absolutely disgusted when I witnessed an elderly gentlemen, a D-Day veteran, begging the French police to be allowed out because he would miss his ferry from Cherbourg. After about 20 minutes he was allowed out, I have no idea whether he caught his ferry. But it made me extremely sad about the disgusting way that people were treated by the French police.

Whilst Sarkozy and Brown were making themselves look important in the town by giving speeches, an elderly veteran — as well as hundreds of others of all nationalities — were being kept hostage in a car park.

After an hour a police van arrived as reinforcements, and it was positioned by the French police to block the exit. For some bizarre reason, some time later, a tannoy announced that only British cars would be allowed to leave. A handful of British cars left; I couldn’t as I was some way back and blocked in.

People were absolutely mad with the French police and could not understand what was going on. On their way out the convoys of Brown and Sarkozy were heckled: furious people shouted, booed, and blew their horns.

I am very sad that a wonderful day was ruined by appalling planning and implementation.