Just what I !@#$% need

[mdlbear]

Disconnecting the mirror drive -- the Maxtor, with errors -- had no effect on the main problem, which still appears to be the Seagate sticking its fingers in its ears and going "la, la, la" while the kernel sulks in a corner because nobody will talk to it.

I'm really unclear as to whether this is a problem with the Seagate drive itself, (there's another one, only slightly bigger, over in the recording box that still works fine), with file corruption of some sort (hard reset after a crash could easily have left some lingering problems on the disk), with SATA drives in general (highly unlikely -- they're working fine on my system at work), or with this particular BIOS (also unlikely).

I'm also wondering to myself whether I should drop back to PATA, or get a 500GB SATA drive. I'm leaning toward the latter, if only because I put my shiny new 500GB PATA drive in an external box and the magic smoke went out. Grump, indeed. Smelled like the magic smoke in the box, so the drive is probably still ok. One hopes.

Plus the fact that I have a pretty full schedule today, so I'm not going to have time to do much work on this, no matter how urgent.

 ...

My inclination is to start by reconnecting the mirror drive, fsck it, and see if I can get a clean backup. Then go to Fry's and get one of the Maxtor 500 SATA's they have on sale. Then we'll see.

10:17 fsck done -- errors on both mirror/ and mirror/home, no doubt due to crashes while writing. Backing up now.

Comments

[pwl1.livejournal.com]

There are some incompatibilities with SATA drives - as technogeek1 can tell you - although I was the one who did the googling to prove it to him ;-) because as both he and the computer store owner knew - they work just fine! A few minutes on Google with motherboard info and SATA drive info might save a few hours (or months!) of frustration.

[andyheninger.livejournal.com]

Since this system seems to be having a whole series of problems, there's always the chance that you've got bad memory or a flaky motherboard. Not overly common, but not all that rare. File system corruption is especially suspicious.

[mdlbear]

Memory's a potential problem; I'll do a thorough test when I have time (although that's not guaranteed to find all problems).

The symptoms are very similar to what I had on a totally different system with an identical drive, so I'm reasonably confident in the diagnosis. I got another Seagate drive, but it's a 500 instead of a 400, and (more importantly) it's made in Thailand rather than China. At least one of the flaky drives was made in China; not sure about the other but I'll check it tomorrow.