[Preston] Re: Strange HDD / IDE problems

[A E Lawrence]

Matthew T. Atkinson wrote:
> 'ellow,
> 
> I've been having some really weird and quite awful-sounding problems
> with the hard disk in my desktop lately.  I was wondering if anyone has
> ever had similar experiences to these:
> 
> * A few times this weekend, everything seemed to hang.  I couldn't
> launch any applications in X.  When I went back to the console I saw
> loads of ``EXT-fs: <some read operation error> sector <big number>''
> messages filling the screen.  I had to reboot the machine to get it back
> to a working state.
> 
> * 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.  The HDD would make horrible turning off/on-type noises.  It would
> die (with the read errors) after only a couple of minutes of being
> turned on.
> 
> * 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!
> 

This does sound as if you have a chipset problem. Have you tried 
changing the BIOS settings? Adding wait states and slowing clocks to see 
if the problems go away. The fact that you have problems with both 
floppies and IDE does make it unlikely that it is the cables or drives 
themselves. As others have said, overheating is another possibility. 
Obviously if you are overclocking, back off from that. In fact, try 
underclocking (BIOS permitting) and see what happens.

Without more information, one can only guess :-(

Adrian