Re: hard drive access
On Thursday 06 October 2005 22:15, Roberto C. Sanchez wrote:
>This past Saturday my main workstation at home quit on me.
> Unfortunately this happened while I was away for the day. When I
> arrived home the system was beeping (a continuous cycle of 1 second
> beep followed by 4 seconds of silence). Originally, I thought it was a
> failed power supply. Antec tech support disagreed with me and referred
> me to the motherboard manufacturer (Biostar). Their tech support said
> that the beep code indicated either a dead CPU or a corrupted BIOS.
> After I explained that removing the RAM, CPU and video card resulted in
> exactly the same beeping, the tech said he was reasonably certain it
> was the BIOS. So, to make a long story short, they are sending me a
> new BIOS chip to install.
And BIOSTAR didn't mention the failed caps problem? Odd. Take a
look at the top of all those capacitors lined up in a row around the
cpu. Pay attention to any bulging of the tops, and to any leakage
onto the motherboard visible at the bases, it is probably an off
white color.
Either condition should be grounds to replace all of those
capacitors. We've salvaged several of their motherboards, and if you
have access to the right soldering tools, its not that difficult a
job. I think they got caught in the bad capacitors thing that got a
lot of Taiwanese makers about 4 years ago. Be sure and use high
quality, low esr rated parts.
>However, there is no guarantee that the new BIOS will fix the problem,
> leaving with the possibility of getting a new mother board. The
> problem I have is that though my system performs regular backups (every
> morning @ 0200) to my file server, there are some important things I
> did Saturday morning to which I need access and if I end up needing a
> new motherboard, it could be anohter week or two before it is back up
> and running. The real problem is that my system has two hard drives in
> RAID1 (software) with LVM on top of that. The question is: How do I
> safely access the data?
>
>The LVM HOWTO has a recipe for moving a volume from one system to
> another, but I can't perform the prep steps since my main system is not
> bootable. Unfortunately, I don't have a spare motherboard laying around
> that I can use either. I know that the RAID part is not so big a deal,
> since it will happily rebuild a "dirty" part of the array. However, I
> am clueless as to how I might get access to the LVM volumes. Any
> suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
>
>-Roberto
>
>--
>Roberto C. Sanchez
>http://familiasanchez.net/~roberto
--
Cheers, Gene
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Copyright 2005 by Maurice Eugene Heskett, all rights reserved.
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