I just installed a new Pentium 100 on a ASUS motherboard. The first thing I noticed was an odd sound coming from my maxtor 1 Gbyte drive. It sounded kinda like a marble on the end of piece of sping steel being drawn back and released about an inch from a thin steel plate. It was a sprong - tic -tic tic, not unlike what a head loading and skipping might sound like on a disk drive.
Anyway, after about 3 hours of testing things and preparing for a backup, the system died. At reboot, the bios caused about six of the infamous sounds then booted up DOS. It didn't find any of the other partitions (other than C). When I tried to load linux, it couldn't find the root partition. I booted with a recovery disk and ran fdisk and it immediately exited with a "cant read /dev/hda" message. I tried Novell Dos fdisk and it hangs producing the sprong sound constantly. I tried MSDOS fdisk and it quits after a minute or so with an error. Obviously something has trashed the partition table. I suspect the hardware has failed. Now this is a question that up until now, I'd have thought a foolish one, but can a Motherboard/IDE controller (onboard) destroy a disk drive? The drive has been working fine until now, but as soon as I installed the new MB, it started making the strange sound until it failed almost completely. I don't suppose anyone knows how I might recover. The reason I swapped the mother board was because I couldn't get the ftape software to work properly and finally decided it was because of the mother board. Thanks, Jim. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Jim Lynch, Sales Analyst, SGI/Cray Research, Inc. / ARS: K4GVO Southeast District, Phone: (770) 631-2254, Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Suite 270, 200 Westpark Drive, Peachtree City, GA 30269
