[Preston] Re: Strange HDD / IDE problems

[Jon Knight]

On Mon, 19 Jan 2004, Matthew T. Atkinson wrote:
> * A few times this weekend, everything seemed to hang. [...]
> 
> * Yesterday it was unable to boot up, the BIOS couldn't see the hard
> disk at one point.  Later on, after I forced the BIOS to re-autodetect
> the HDD, it booted most of the way but sometimes died when entering
> GDM. [...]

This sounds like the errors I've seen on dodgy Fujitsu drives in the past, 
mostly in Viglen PCs running Windows.  However for once its not a Windows 
problem: Fujitsu made an absolutely awful hard disc model that ruined 
their hitherto good reputation and nearly forced them out of business 
(they left the desktop hard disc market!).  However...
 
> * This morning, I was desparately trying to get a presentation off it
> that I had done for work and the same errors started happening on the
> floppy drive!

Hmm, the errors you include for those could mean one of two things;

a) you had a bad floppy or floppy drive as well as a soon to expire
   harddisc.  Unlucky!

OR

b) the hard disc, floppy drive and floppy are fine but your controller 
   chip is on the way out.  Doubly unlucky as the controller chip on
   modern PCs is usually integrated with a load of other functions 
   and you might find the entire PC dies if it goes.
 
> * Now I have come home and it has booted up, so I thought I would try
> e-mailing to see if any of you had experienced anything like this
> before.  I had originally thought it was the HDD but now I am wondering
> if it could be the mobo too/instead.

Possibly if its option b) above.  One way to find out would be to disable 
the on board IDE/floppy interfaces and stick in a separate IDE/floppy 
card.  I've got a stack of old ISA ones but you might want/have to get a 
PCI one.  If the rest of the onboard stuff still works (what that stuff is 
depends on the level of integration on your chipset but you might find its 
stuff like USB, keyboard, etc) that will at least point you in the 
direction of a dying motherboard.  If you can't borrow/blag a 
suitableIDE/floppy interface card off anyone, see if your floppy drive and 
hard disc still misbehave when placed in someone else's PC.  I'd advise 
using an old test PC just in case the hard disc or floppy drive have some 
weird hardware error that is slowly frying your disc controller!

Incidentally, also check the temperature in your crate and make sure the 
fans are working OK.  Over temperature is likely to nuke the RAM before 
the disc controller but you never know.

Jim'll