Re: OT: Hardware diagnostic
On Tue, 2007-03-27 at 22:49 -0500, Kent West wrote:
> Not Debian-related at all, but you folks are brilliant, so I'll ask anyway.
>
> A friend brought her HP Pavilion ze5170 laptop to me the other day; she
> said her hard drive had died, and she ordered a new one, and on
> installing it she could never get the System Restore CDs to restore the
> system. She also wanted to set up the laptop to dual-boot with Debian,
> which is why she brought it to me.
>
> The System Recovery process boots and starts normally, but in the
> partitioning step early in the process, it starts to run very slowly,
> dropping to a crawl at "Verifying Partition" and never finishing even
> after 36 hours.
>
> So I've spent the last two days with it, trying the System Restore CDs,
> manually modifying/formatting partitions, Knoppix, an older Etch CD and
> one downloaded just today.
>
> Basically, I've decided the drive was not the problem, but something in
> the BIOS/mobo/controller.
>
> I can install Etch, but on reboot, GRUB takes tens of minutes to make
> any progress, and never, after hours of waiting, gets all the way to the
> GRUB menu.
>
> I can boot off of Knoppix and chroot into Etch and do anything I want. I
> even installed LILO. So the drive is quite functional during "normal"
> usage. But on rebooting, LILO exhibited similar behavior to that of GRUB.
>
> In addition to the original drive she thought was bad (but seems fine
> when put into another laptop), and the new drive, I also tried a third
> drive. The laptop exhibited the same symptoms with each.
>
> So the machine boots fine off and runs off the CD drive just fine.
>
> It performs just fine during installation of Etch and running a chroot'd
> environment.
>
> But it won't boot off the hard drive, or get past the partitioning stage
> of the Recovery CDs.
>
> So I'm hoping some of you folks might know more precisely what is
> causing this.
>
> It seems that the IDE controller is fine, since the CDROM drive works,
> and the drive works most of the time.
>
> It seems that the mobo is fine.
>
> The BIOS seems to function. (But she did mention that the BIOS does not
> keep time; perhaps a dead BIOS battery (do laptops have those?) is
> corrupting some boot-level code of the BIOS without making the BIOS
> totally screwy?)
>
> So what could explain these symptoms? (I don't expect a fix; I'm just
> hoping for an explanation.)
Turn off the "SMART" for the drive and see what happens. Might be the
SMART to not SMART.
One other thing, if the drive is set to "auto" recognize, some of the
older BIOS for that laptop screw that up... even on drives already been
there for months.
You should force the settings rather than let the BIOS "auto" it.
also, you might want to try a BIOS/Firmware update on the laptop.
--
greg, greg@gregfolkert.net
Novell's Directory Services is a competitive product to Microsoft's
Active Directory in much the same way that the Saturn V is a competitive
product to those dinky little model rockets that kids light off down at
the playfield. -- Thane Walkup
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