[Sussex] The torment

[Steve Dobson]

David

On Tue, Mar 30, 2004 at 01:06:02PM +0100, David Chapman wrote:
<major snipage>
> > On Mon, Mar 29, 2004 at 12:55:28PM +0100, David Chapman wrote:
> > > I have been forced to use Windows latley because of a hardware failure.
> > > Hard drives going off line and boot failures because grub can't find the
> > > HD with Linux on it.
> >
> > I've had boot problems because of installing new kernels and not updating
> > the MBR correctly :-( - can't blame the system it was me !!!
> >
> > > This is why I never made it to the Lug moot last week.
> > > Busy pulling my hair out !
> >
> > But if you had come along I (and Geoff, and others I'm sure) would have
> > told you how to re-install your MBR - it's not that hard with a rescue
> > CD/Floppy.
> Not an MBR problem.
> The Linux HD was disconnecting from the scsi bus.

Strange.

> > You didn't just reinstall the 
> > system to fix a MGR problem did you.
> No I didnt

Good - saves time.

> >   System taken to meeting should have.
> Being a retired Windows PDC quad Xeon server It's a bit big.

But in the new location we have the room (pun intended).

> > Why some many SCSI cards?  How many devices have you hanging of that
> > system?
> 3 scsi channels are onboard.
> 1x narrow
> 2x lvd
> 
> I added another card because I thought the onboard scsi channel the HD's are 
> on might be faulty

I might be teaching me grandmother to suck eggs here:  But have you correctly
terminated your SCSI buses?  If the wrong terminator is on the wrong bus
then this can cause signal ghosting or other hardware type problems that I
don't understand.  It is the only time, going back a few years when I played
with SCSI a lot, that I'd see problems like a drive sometimes being there
and sometimes not.

Steve D