[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > > At 11:03 AM 3/29/2007, you wrote: > >Janos Dohanics wrote: > > > >>I also ran the Seagate drive utility which found no problems with the > >>drive. When the same kind of crash happened again, I thought the problem > >>may be the IDE controller, I have replaced the motherboard. > >>Now it crashed again with the new motherboard - and I don't know what > >>should I do next: should I just replace an apparently good hard drive? > > > >If you know the drive is good (e.g. by testing it in another machine), the > >first thing you should replace is the power supply. Weird drive behavior > >is often a sign of weak PSUs. > > FWIW, I tested the power supply with an inexpensive power supply tester; it > checked out. I guess I should replace it, nonetheless... > > >>Also, if this is just a hard drive crash, shouldn't the system keep > >>going? > > > >So, you're saying that if a drive starts giving invalid or > >noninterpretable communications back to the IDE controller, causing the > >controller to wedge, which possibly brings down the PCI bus on which it's > >connecte, tied to the front side bus and the CPU, the OS should just > >continue? On what?
This does actually happen sometimes. I had a desktop PC where the drive failed in this manner -- the drive just "went away" and the OS kept going. I'm not saying that you're wrong -- I'm just saying that PC hardware is weird enough that strange things are not only possible, they're likely. > I guess you make a good point: the fact that the system wedges, points to > something other than the drive. Still, it's always the same drive that > quits... It's almost definitely a HDD crash. The problem is that if the circuitry on HDD has gone flakey, it may pass the Seagate test just fine. In order for Seagate's test to fail, you'd have to test it while the drive is flakey. If I understand your description of the problem, the drive works most of the time, and crashes occasionally. As a result, statistically, the drive is probably fine when you're running the Seagate tests. We have the same problem with RAM going bad. RAM tends to go bad by becoming unpredictable. Then someone runs memtest for 10 minutes and says, "nope, RAM is just fine". Which is nonsense. If the RAM was bad every 10 minutes, your computer would be completely unusable. If it's only crashing once a day, you need to let memtest run all day to see if can catch the problem in the act. Hard drives _usually_ fail dramatically -- but occasionally they fail in the same way RAM does, which seems like what's happening to you. A lot of techs don't see this case very often (because it doesn't happen like this very often) so don't recognize it. -- Bill Moran http://www.potentialtech.com _______________________________________________ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]"
