[nylug-talk] hard drive failure

[mylar]

On Mon, 2006-08-21 at 11:26, Paul Robbins wrote:
> I had a Linux box with a 7GB master disk and a 80G slave drive.  Over the
> weekend, I tried to access something off the slave drive and it showed
> nothing on the disk. I tried to unmount it, but got an error.  After some
> other attempts to mount or unmount the drive, i decided to reboot to see if
> it would get re-initialized on boot.  Instead, when it came back up, it
> tried to boot off of the NIC card, ignoring both of the hard drives. When I
> would disconnect the slave drive from the cable, the system would boot from
> the master drive without a problem.  I also tried to boot using Knoppix to
> see if the drive would be recognized that way, but it was not.  I have DVD
> backups of the critical files, but I don't want to lose a drive if the is
> an easy solution.  Generally, the Knoppix option works for me to at least
> pull off the data I need from a bad drive, but I haven't seen it fail to be
> recognized at all. Is this a sign of no power getting to the drive? Any help
> or recommendations would be greatly appreciated.

I have had incidents where hard drives "failed" because power wasn't
getting to the drive. In particular a Dell machine which was 
intermittent. I thought the drive was  failing but it was an
intermittent power problem.i.e. flimsy loose connector. If  you have a
free unused Molex connector in the machine try swapping it and see what
happens. Otherwise it sounds like a bad drive.  If it's an ide type
drive and it's bad it can often cause the other device on the
controller  to malfunction until the offending device is removed.

mylar