Is my hard drive thrashed?

Dan Hensley dan at dshensley.com
Sat Feb 17 00:28:19 UTC 2007


On Fri, 2007-02-16 at 14:30 -0800, Rick Stevens wrote:
> On Fri, 2007-02-16 at 15:14 -0700, Dan Hensley wrote:
> > On Fri, 2007-02-16 at 17:59 +0000, tokyoi at mac.com wrote:
> > > Dan Hensley wrote:
> > > 
> > > >[...] I ordered a new hard drive that should arrive tomorrow in case it's a
> > > >hardware problem.  My motherboard or BIOS may also have something to do
> > > >with it, but I'm not sure.  Right now my system is up and running
> > > >because I built a boot floppy.  But I see another kernel update waiting
> > > >to be installed.  I hesitate to download it because I don't know what
> > > >kind of mess it will make with my system.
> > > >
> > > 
> I've been updating six FC6 machines (One Intel 32-bit, one AMD 32-bit,
> two Athlon 64s, one Athlon 64/X2 and one Opteron 1210) since FC6 came
> out and have never had a grub corruption issue.  I suspect hardware at
> your end.

Were these fresh installs?  I did an upgrade from FC4.  That probably
doesn't have anything to do with it, but you never know.

All I know is that I now doubt that my hard drive is the problem.  It's
working fine now.  GRUB boots.  About the only thing I can think of that
I did was turn on SATA channel 2 in the BIOS (was off because I only
have 1 SATA drive), and changed drive boot order in the BIOS so the SATA
drive is first in the list.  I have an IDE drive on as well that I use
for nightly rsync backups, but it's not bootable as far as I know.

> Your drive was questionable, as you found out.  You may have a bad RAM
> stick (pop your sticks out, reseat them and run memtest86) or your power
> supply may be getting weak (slap on a DMM and check it).  You'd be
> amazed at how weird a machine can get if the power supply is dying.

My power supply died several months ago, so I replaced it with a new
Antec one.  So I doubt that's it.  I haven't run memtest86 recently.

In terms of hardware, the only thing I really suspect is my motherboard.
More specifically, the BIOS.  So I guess it's technically a software
issue.

I have a new hard drive now, so as soon as I figure out how to mirror my
old one onto the new one (it's identical in brand and size, just has
more cache) I may just use that one as the primary drive and use my old
one as a backup.

I wish I knew how to better test the BIOS or power supply.

Dan




> 
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> - Rick Stevens, Senior Systems Engineer     rstevens at vitalstream.com -
> - VitalStream, Inc.                       http://www.vitalstream.com -
> -                                                                    -
> -         The Navy's a bunch of wimps!  MY job's an adventure!       -
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