Re: OT: Damaged harddisk and/or disk controller
Kjetil Kjernsmo wrote:
[snip]
What I see is that if the primary master disk isn't detected, the
primary slave isn't either. However, if I pull the IDE cable from the
primary master, the primary slave is detected. This too, could be
This sounds like an electronics problem on the "master" disc.
random, as I have not seen it often enough to tell, but it seems so,
indicating that the controller is fine. I have also bought a new IDE
cable, so it is not the cable.
Today, I pulled the power from the disk, and when I inserted it again,
it gave a sound like "I'm spinning, I'm spinning!", and that was what
did the trick, it seemed. Could it be that occasionally the disk simply
doesn't start spinning at all after a shutdown?
This sounds like stiction.
In the list of devices on bootup, the IDE controller always shows with a
single entry, so it is not that the IDE controller is totally absent.
lspci also shows it as:
0000:00:04.1 IDE interface: VIA Technologies, Inc.
VT82C586A/B/VT82C686/A/B/VT823x/A/C PIPC Bus Master IDE (rev 06)
The primary disk, a Maxtor 40 GB disk, has been a bit unreliable from
the start, so I suspect it is to blame. As some may remember, I have
Connor, now owned by Maxtor IIRC, was *notorious* for not working well
with drives not manufactured by Connor.
You can buy a new bare Seagate (I've only had good experiences with
them) 40GB drive for $50 USD or so here in the Dallas, Texas area.
How much is your time worth? How much is your data worth?
[snip]
Any ideas on how to attack this issue to bring more certainty as to the
cause?
My recommendation:
Get all the data you possibly can off that disc ASAP, and buy a
replacement disc for $50. Then, and only then, start thinking about
whether that drive can possibly be used for data storage. Maybe
you could put /tmp on it or something.
Mike
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