weird hard drive failure

[Darren R. Gitelman]

I've had 2 hard drives fail on 2 different Dell precision workstations (420) within the last week. Wondering if anyone has ever seen the scenario below:
Both drives were IBM Deskstar 60 GB. Both drives were configured as stand-alone (i.e., not part of raid), and had 2 partitions, one swap the other data. Neither drive was a boot drive (they contained data).
I turned on dma access to speed up the drive
/sbin/hdparm -c1 -d1 /dev/hdb
All seemed to work fine on check
/sbin/hdparm /dev/hda
I/O support = 1 (32-bit)
using_dma = 1 (on)

1 day later for one drive and 2 minutes later for the other there are read errors on the drive and it is no longer recognized by the system, like it's not even there anymore. On boot up the bios doesn't see the drive. I've tried switching the connector, setting the drive to master or slave, using tomsrtbt to start the system and seeing if it can see the drive, using Dell Diagnostics which runs in DOS. The drive cannot be seen but it sounds as if it turns on. This does not seem to be a case of corrupt data.
Any thoughts?
Darren

-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Darren R. Gitelman, M.D.
Cognitive Neurology and Alzheimer¹s Disease Center
E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
WWW: http://www.brain.northwestern.edu
Voice: (312) 908-9023
Fax: (312) 908-8789
Northwestern Univ., 320 E. Superior St., Searle 11-470, Chicago, IL 60611
-------------------------------------------------------------------------



--
redhat-list mailing list
unsubscribe mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]?subject=unsubscribe
https://listman.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/redhat-list