I ran into this (using hdparm 9.48+ds-1 running under Ubuntu 16.04.1 LTS) with some HP Enterprise MB4000GCWLV drives that don't have APM support (i.e. hdparm -I /dev/sdb | grep "Advanced Power" returns no output, or [as mentioned in comment #5] "hdparm -B" reports "not supported").
For these drives, along with the "failed with exit code 5" log messages, the default behavior of /lib/udev/hdparm triggered a "SMART error (ErrorCount) detected on host" email from smartd each time the system was rebooted (one email for each affected drive). Each warning email had a message similar to: Device: /dev/sdb [SAT], ATA error count increased from 33 to 34 ... and sure enough, "smartctl -l error /dev/sdb" showed errors like this one: Error 30 [1] occurred at disk power-on lifetime: 5380 hours (224 days + 4 hours) When the command that caused the error occurred, the device was active or idle. After command completion occurred, registers were: ER -- ST COUNT LBA_48 LH LM LL DV DC -- -- -- == -- == == == -- -- -- -- -- 04 -- 51 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 Error: ABRT Commands leading to the command that caused the error were: CR FEATR COUNT LBA_48 LH LM LL DV DC Powered_Up_Time Command/Feature_Name -- == -- == -- == == == -- -- -- -- -- --------------- -------------------- ef 00 05 01 fe dc d8 08 00 00 00 40 08 10:18:04.515 SET FEATURES [Enable APM] 2f 00 00 00 01 00 00 00 00 00 11 00 08 10:17:53.325 READ LOG EXT 2f 00 00 00 01 00 00 00 00 06 04 00 08 10:17:53.091 READ LOG EXT 2f 00 00 00 01 00 00 00 00 05 04 00 08 10:17:52.857 READ LOG EXT 2f 00 00 00 01 00 00 00 00 04 04 00 08 10:17:52.618 READ LOG EXT Once I tracked these errors down to the default settings in the hdparm udev script, I was able to avoid them by setting the "apm" option to blank in a hdparm.conf device block, e.g. /dev/disk/by-id/wwn[...] { apm = } (This causes the script to end up running "hdparm -B" instead of "hdparm -B254" for the drive in question, thus skipping the attempt to enable APM on the drive, and as a result avoiding both the error exit status message and a new instance of the error in the ATA error log.) Nathan -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Bugs, which is subscribed to Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1470014 Title: systemd-udevd: Process '/lib/udev/hdparm' failed with exit code 5. To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/hdparm/+bug/1470014/+subscriptions -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs