Spontaneous reboots :(

[Shawn Wilson]

I've seen hard drives fail a couple times. In both cases, it was as if the
read/write heads would get stuck (however, the drive would continue trying
to move them) and therefore create lots of unusual noises. The only way I
could use them again was to remove power, and then repower the drive
(causing it to reset the read/write heads to their default position). This
was a problem that scandisk, etc. wouldn't normally detect because it only
happened every once in a while. So, if the drive didn't get stuck during the
test, it would test as okay... but if it did, then the computer would simply
hang waiting for the drive to finish moving the head (which would never
happen) and the only way to recover was to power off. If this sounds like
the problem you're having, my recommendation: get a new drive ASAP. The
problem can only get worse so the sooner you get a new drive the sooner you
may be able to recover what is on there.

Shawn A. Wilson


----- Original Message -----
From: "Cliff" <cliffo at u.washington.edu>
To: "UW Linux Group" <linux at u.washington.edu>
Sent: Monday, February 28, 2000 6:49 PM
Subject: Spontaneous reboots :(


> Hey all,
>
> So my K6 has rebooted mysteriously three times since Saturday morning.
> I'm running behind my P90 with masquerading so I don't suspect outside
> intervention.  More to the point, the computer doesn't survive the Power
> On Self Test and sits there while my Maxtor hard drive makes
> really-not-so-good sounds intermittently.  I obviously suspect this is
> the cause of my troubles (ie bad hard drive), but I've never seen one go
> bad such that a machine reboots with no error messages in logs or
> anything.  The maxtor disk diag tool finds nothing wrong yet I have to
> power cycle (plain reboot won't do it) the machine for the drive to
> recover and then it acts fine until the box reboots again.  I don't
> suspect memory would have suddenly gone bad on me...any ideas?  Or am
> I just S.O.L...
>
> Cliff
>