[olug] Hard Drive Failure?

[William E. Kempf]

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