[olug] Hard Drive Failure?

[Jonathan Warren]

I would agree.  Check everything because you never know but personally I question the new equipment first.  

-Jon

On Mon, Feb 10, 2003 at 03:14:34PM -0600, Jay Swackhamer wrote:
> 
> In the past I've had the same experiences that ended up being
> once bad memory, another time the HD, another MB
> 
> If the bios wont recognize it, it could be either, the easiest way
> to pinpoint it would be to test the components in another machine.
> 
> Or boot from another media and run WD's diagnostic's.
> 
> You could verify the hardware by booting from one of gentoo's
> live cd's or RH's boot cd and run a 'media check'...........
> 
> 
> 
> 
> > Had a bad weekend.  Some of you know from the last Install Fest that I
> > had a HD going bad.  Well, I replaced it last week with a brand new 80
> > GB Western Digital.  From the very beginning I was nervous... the drive
> > seemed fairly loud to me (not the spinning of the platters, but the
> > movement of the head) and it sure *seemed* to be running slower than my
> > previous drive when I expected it to be faster.  But it appeared to be
> > running properly and a forced fsck didn't reveal any problems (that's
> > the extent of my diagnotic abilities using Linux, so if there's other
> > things I should have done, let me know).
> >
> > It ran for most of the week.  Twice during the week I had the entire
> > system lock up, but didn't know what the culprit was.  Then Friday
> > things started to get worse.  I had to reboot because the system was
> > locked up, and though the OS would come up, it ran so slowly as to be
> > basically unusable.  I fought with trying to diagnose the problem for a
> > little while, and another reboot resulted in the error "no drq after
> > issuing write" displayed by the kernel.  Eventually I also received
> > errors such as (and this is from memory, so not 100% accurate) "dma_intr
> > status=0x61 {DeviceReady DeviceFault Error}" and the same thing
> > basically but with status=0x04.  Amazingly, on two different reboots the
> > BIOS couldn't even detect the drive, and I had to do a cold boot to get
> > the BIOS to recognize the drive's presence again.
> >
> > So why this e-mail?  Because I'm not 100% convinced it's the drive and
> > not the mother board/IDE controller (though I'm heavily leaning towards
> > the drive).  Why not?  Because I'm seeing some other issues as well, for
> > one thing.  For another, it doesn't make much sense to me that
> > occasionally the BIOS can't detect the drive.  The other issue I've been
> > seeing that's not related to the drive and which perplexes me is that
> > when installing Mandrake 9 on the new HD I tried to specify a static IP
> > (sitting behind a Linksys router), and couldn't get Mandrake to ever
> > start the network services that way.  DHCP worked fine, but a static IP
> > would not.  Both the IDE and Ethernet are built into this mother board
> > (which is a new board from DIT).  So I just don't feel comfortable that
> > the mother board can't be the culprit of my problems.
> >
> > So, what do people think?  Should I be concerned about the MB, or does
> > it just sound like a bad HD?  Are there any Linux configuration things I
> > should try to diagnose the problem (after replacing the HD, because
> > right now I can't even boot from this one)?  Any ideas why I'd have
> > problems assigning a static IP and could it be in any way related to the
> > HD problems I've had?
> >
> > Bill Kempf
> >
> > William E. Kempf
> > wekempf at cox.net
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > OLUG mailing list
> > OLUG at olug.org
> > http://lists.olug.org/mailman/listinfo/olug
> 
> 
> -- 
> Jay Swackhamer
> 
> Reboot The User
> 15791 West Dodge Road, STE 135
> Omaha, NE 68118
> (402) 933-6449
> http://www.RebootTheUser.com
> 
> 
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