Why should a machine not boot liveCD if HD fails?

[mike cloaked]

In the past few days as some will know from a previous thread I had a total
failure of a machine that is now resolved after replacing the hard drive -
however one thing puzzles me - why would a computer with a failed SATA hard
drive be unable to boot from a liveDVD in the optical drive?

Maybe this is a suitable mystery to solve as we come to Halloween!
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[Mikkel]

Mike Cloaked wrote:
>  
>  In fact with no alteration in the BIOS settings at all - once the new HD was
>  in place I interrupted the boot with F12 and selected the optical drive to
>  start PartedMagic from the liveDVD  - exactly this process worked once the
>  new drive was in place where it failed to do so with the dead HD in place -
>  that is something I never experienced before.
>   
It may have been that the drive was detected, but was not responding
to the request for drive information. The system will hang for a
long time waiting for the drive to spin up and respond. You can run
into the same problem when the BIOS is set to a specific drive
size/type, and you remove that drive. I have also seen it happen
when you put in too large of a drive for the controller.

Mikkel
-- 

  Do not meddle in the affairs of dragons,
for thou art crunchy and taste good with Ketchup!

[Rick Stevens]

Mike Cloaked wrote:
>  In the past few days as some will know from a previous thread I had a
> total
>  failure of a machine that is now resolved after replacing the hard drive -
>  however one thing puzzles me - why would a computer with a failed SATA hard
>  drive be unable to boot from a liveDVD in the optical drive?
>  
>  Maybe this is a suitable mystery to solve as we come to Halloween! 
Depends on HOW the drive died.  It may have died in a manner that hangs
the SATA controller and the bus as a consequence.  That used to be a
problem with SCSI back in the "good ol' days" on occasion.  Open 
collector drivers and tristate buffers only work if everyone cooperates,
after all.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
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- Millihelen, adj: The amount of beauty required to launch one ship. -
----------------------------------------------------------------------

[Ted Roche]

On Fri, Oct 30, 2009 at 5:23 PM, Mike Cloaked <mike.cloaked(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote:
>  why would a computer with a failed SATA hard
>  drive be unable to boot from a liveDVD in the optical drive? 
Perhaps the machine's BIOS was not configured to boot from the optical drive.

-- 
Ted Roche
Ted Roche & Associates, LLC
http://www.tedroche.com

[mike cloaked]

Ted Roche-2 wrote:
>  
>  On Fri, Oct 30, 2009 at 5:23 PM, Mike Cloaked <mike.cloaked(a)gmail.com&gt;
>  wrote:
> > why would a computer with a failed SATA hard
> > drive be unable to boot from a liveDVD in the optical drive?
>  
>  Perhaps the machine's BIOS was not configured to boot from the optical
>  drive.
>  
>   
No - what I have done for a long time is set it to boot from HD but when
starting the boot process, like many machines you can hit F12 and select
which device to boot from - that is how I do many processes like
partitioning etc.... 

In fact with no alteration in the BIOS settings at all - once the new HD was
in place I interrupted the boot with F12 and selected the optical drive to
start PartedMagic from the liveDVD  - exactly this process worked once the
new drive was in place where it failed to do so with the dead HD in place -
that is something I never experienced before.

Clearly whatever had failed in the drive did something really bad to the
system so that booting from the other drive would not work - that was why it
was such as nasty failure - and led me to believe that it was more than just
a bad HD - maybe others have had something similar?

Anyway f11 is now running on the machine in question and it is doing its
long yum update as I write this... 
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