You might assume you have a bad drive or the SATA interface/cable is bad, or the power supply is bad/weak to the drive. These are all possible issues, but definitely check your SATA cable for "twisting". It is a big issue because until the error stops or times out, your system will not boot (in my case this was the case even though the drive with the issue was not part of the OS or booting process at all). If you run an open rig that you move around often that ha........

There's no partial WD EARS alignment fix: I had data on /dev/sda3 and /dev/sdb3 (RAID1) so I couldn't edit that one. I thought I'd be smart and try fixing the first two partitions so I set the first one starting at sector 2048 and then +8 for the second partition. This has really slowed the performance down worse than it ever was! Disk /dev/sda: 2000.4 GB, 2000398934016 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 243201 cylinders, tot........