Recently I’ve been experiencing some system instability in my desktop. Windows seemed to work fine, but whenever I booted into Ubuntu my system would pause periodically.

At first I thought this had to do with my pretty bootleg / manual install of wireless drivers, so I uninstalled them. Then I wondered if my cooling wasn’t doing a good job and maybe it was a processor pause. But that didn’t seem to add up because Windows didn’t have issues.

I started wondering if my linux drive was bad (my windows and linux partitions are installed on separate drives) so I decided to do what I should have done earlier and check dmesg. Bingo! Turns out there were these funky errors:

[56768.801750] ata1.00: exception Emask 0x10 SAct 0x18000 SErr 0x280100 action 0x6 frozen
[56768.801754] ata1.00: irq_stat 0x08000000, interface fatal error
[56768.801755] ata1: SError: { UnrecovData 10B8B BadCRC }
[56768.801757] ata1.00: failed command: READ FPDMA QUEUED
[56768.801759] ata1.00: cmd 60/28:78:80:81:39/00:00:37:00:00/40 tag 15 ncq 20480 in
                        res 40/00:84:b8:81:39/00:00:37:00:00/40 Emask 0x10 (ATA bus error)
[56768.801760] ata1.00: status: { DRDY }
[56768.801761] ata1.00: failed command: READ FPDMA QUEUED
[56768.801763] ata1.00: cmd 60/08:80:b8:81:39/00:00:37:00:00/40 tag 16 ncq 4096 in
                        res 40/00:84:b8:81:39/00:00:37:00:00/40 Emask 0x10 (ATA bus error)
[56768.801764] ata1.00: status: { DRDY }

There was a good chance my SATA cable was bad, so I replaced it and the messages (and instability) went away.