Hi all, My question is, I suppose OT, since things go wrong long before bootup, but with the many fine folks here, I hope you will permit me, and perhaps even provide me with an answer! :-)
For a long time, I have had problems before boot: My primary master disk is sometimes not detected, and thus, the machine doesn't boot. It happens about once a month, and it is completely magic to me: I usually pull the power cable, fiddle a bit with the IDE cable to the primary disk, reconnects and that does the trick. If these actions have an effect, I really do not know, and sometimes, like this morning, a lot more fiddling was required... I don't even know if it is the disk that's the problem or the disk controller, and that's my primary concern that I hope you can help with. 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 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? 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 been thinking about buying a RAID controller for this box, and this is part of the equation, allthough I have pretty much suspended the idea for now. If the IDE controller is flaky, then I would want to buy a new SATA controller and a SATA disk, but if it just the disk, then I'd go for just a new IDE disk, but it would of course be sad to have gotten a IDE disk if the controller was bad... So, it is a financial question too... :-) Any ideas on how to attack this issue to bring more certainty as to the cause? Cheers, Kjetil -- Kjetil Kjernsmo Programmer / Astrophysicist / Ski-orienteer / Orienteer / Mountaineer [EMAIL PROTECTED] Homepage: http://www.kjetil.kjernsmo.net/ OpenPGP KeyID: 6A6A0BBC -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
