On 18 March 2011 12:20, Barry Drake <bdr...@crosswire.org> wrote: > Hi there ...... > > I'm really scratching my head over this one. My wife's computer has a > ALiveNF6P-VSTA motherboard. This has one IDE connector and four SATA > ports. It was running Windows 2000 on a SATA drive, so I installed a > second SATA drive (250 GiB) and put Ubuntu 10.04 on it. I also > installed a 160 GiB IDE drive for backups and all was fine. > > Last week, the IDE drive gave a SMART report that it was getting flaky > so I replaced it with a 500 GiB Hitachi SATA drive. Problems! Could > not copy more than 167.9 MB of data (by any means) After that, the > partition (ext4) became read only until I rebooted! I tried > re-partitioning and re-formatting and the drive appeared to die. A > Hitachi boot disk with a diagnostic/repair tool told be that the boot > sector had an irrecoverable mechanical error. > > As a last resort, I popped the drive into my computer, and it > re-formatted perfectly and showed no SMART errors. I tried a 160 GiB WD > drive in my wife's computer. EXACTLY the same problem occurs. I've now > re-formatted it to NTFS and tried booting into the Windows 2000 disk. > There is no problem copying files to the WD disk from Windows. But the > problem is identical from Ubuntu. > > I've tried swapping the disks into different SATA slots and I've tried > various things in the BIOS. The only clue here is that the Mobo manual > tells me: "LBA/Large Mode - Use this item to select the LBA/Large mode > for a hard disk > 512 MB under DOS and Windows; for Netware and UNIX > user, select [Disabled] to disable the LBA/Large mode." > > I've tried this on the WD drive and it makes no difference. I tried it > on the Ubuntu drive, but it causes Grub failure and brings up the Grub > rescue prompt. I could re-install with the LBA/Large mode turned off, > but it's going to be hard for me to do a backup first .... I think I'd > have to re-install an IDE drive to do it. > > This entire saga doesn't make any sense at all to me. Any thoughts? I > have no problem at all with either of the above SATA drives in my own > computer which also has three SATA drives installed - and the LBA/Large > mode is set to 'auto' on that one. > > Kind regards, Barry. > > I'd check if there's an update for the BIOS, I've seen various drives/chipset configurations have weird issues over time :)
-Matt Daubney
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