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!
On Fri, Oct 30, 2009 at 5:23 PM, Mike Cloaked mike.cloaked@gmail.com 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-2 wrote:
On Fri, Oct 30, 2009 at 5:23 PM, Mike Cloaked mike.cloaked@gmail.com 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...
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. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- - Rick Stevens, Systems Engineer ricks@nerd.com - - AIM/Skype: therps2 ICQ: 22643734 Yahoo: origrps2 - - - - Millihelen, adj: The amount of beauty required to launch one ship. - ----------------------------------------------------------------------
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
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mike cloaked -
Mikkel -
Rick Stevens -
Ted Roche