Re: [OT] Hard Drive shutdown
On Fri, Jul 30, 2004 at 01:30:39PM +1000, Tim Connors wrote:
> David <dbree@duo-county.com> said on Thu, 29 Jul 2004 12:36:34 -0500:
> > On Thu, Jul 29, 2004 at 04:37:08PM +0100, Matthew T. Atkinson wrote:
> > > I've had something very similar to this before. My HDD is
> > > ``S.M.A.R.T.'' and it never warned me of immanent destruction so I was
> > > very concerned. I asked around and was told ``before you go out and bu
> > > a new disk, try wiggling the IDE cable around''. Of course I took this
> > > with a pinch of salt but I did try it -- and it worked!
> > >
> > > As hard to believe as it is, something along the lines of ``chip-creep''
> > > appears to have happened to my IDE cable. Not two weeks after this,
> > > someone else I knew had the same problem on their box!
> > >
> > > So, give it a go -- it might help.
> >
> > Hadn't thought to check that out. Will do it. However, it seems odd
> > that it would lose connection and then regain it again. I never so much
> > as touched the case and it picked right back up.
>
> Could have cooled.
>
> Mine did it in particular when I wobbled the IDE cable - I thought it
> was a bad cable at the time, but all my cables seemed equally bad.
This is quite plausible, however, this happened about 1/2 hour after
startup, about 3PM, after being off since early morning. According to
the log, it started back up within 1 minute, although it seemed longer
to me. The drive actually shut off - I heard it click and then spin
down - and then click and spin back up. I'd think the drive should not
have gotten very warm in that period of time, and it often has uptimes
of 4-6 days.
Also, as I said in my original post, I was in X. I don't recall if I
hit a key or not, but it didn't seem as if the mouse was working. It
came back on after I hit CTRL-ALT-F1. Also, the screen didn't switch
immediately, but only after the HD came back on. It almost seems as if
the computer itself had done all this. While this was all going on,
however, the HD light was flickering normally (for it) as if real disk
activity was going on.
My kern.logs go back to Jul 2. This is the only instance back to then,
and it hasn't repeated itself again so far.
> I eventually discovered the bottom of the HD was almost touching the
> metal case. If I turned off the computer for any length of time,
> things would cool, and shrink, and the HD would touch the case. If I
> wobbled the connector, the bottom of the drive would touch the
> case. It was particularly peculiar, in that as long as I held the
> reset button down, one of my drives would power down, but the other
> would stay up.
>
> I put plastic between the case and the bottom of the drive and it all
> works now.
I just checked my drive. I have a single HD mounted in the second bay
from the bottom, with nothing below it, and nothing in the next bay
above it. Thanks for this tip, though, it may prove helpful later.
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