Regarding the IDE hard drive going bad... can you elaborate more on the symptoms? I've been trying to track down system instability on one of my systems which is running *cough* XP pro. I think I've traced it down to a bad hard drive, but I'm curious what symptoms you were seeing. Thanks. -----Original Message----- From: Andy Stewart [mailto:andystewart@attbi.com] Sent: Tuesday, May 14, 2002 8:14 AM To: wlug@mail.wlug.org; Gregory Avedissian Subject: Re: [Wlug] Locked up On Tuesday 14 May 2002 01:05, Gregory Avedissian wrote:
Still? I don't know, as I've never logged in remotely. Can I do this from a friend's house next time it locks up? I'm not set up as a server, and I don't really know what I'd need to change to do that.
Could I do it with the parallel port connection that Andy is going to talk about on Wednesday?
Greg
HI Greg, If you setup the parallel port connection between two computers (A and B) and insure that its working, when computer A locks up, you could try logging in over the parallel port connection from computer B to see if it really locked up or simply not responding to keyboard/mouse input. Lockups really stink. It took me several weeks to finally figure out my problem (an IDE hard drive slowly going bad). Memtest is great - definitely try it out. I would also recommend the Cerberus Test Control System program (ctcs). It is the program used by VA Linux to burn in their hardware. It does some *really* stressful things to the hardware and will find anything that is flaky (supposedly). Later, Andy -- Andy Stewart, Founder Worcester Linux Users' Group Worcester, MA USA http://www.wlug.org _______________________________________________ Wlug mailing list Wlug@mail.wlug.org http://mail.wlug.org/mailman/listinfo/wlug
On Tuesday 14 May 2002 08:53, dibb_jim@emc.com wrote:
Regarding the IDE hard drive going bad... can you elaborate more on the symptoms?
I've been trying to track down system instability on one of my systems which is running *cough* XP pro. I think I've traced it down to a bad hard drive, but I'm curious what symptoms you were seeing. Thanks.
At first, I was seeing random lockups (about one every two weeks). Sure, that could have been alot of things - bad memory, hot CPU, etc. I checked for all of these but found no problems. The failure seemed to only occur under load, so I ran 6 simultaneous Seti@Home jobs (on a 2 cpu machine), but then it refused to fail. One day, however, the disk started logging uncorrectable errors in the /var/log/messages file just before it locked up. It got bad enough that I had to work hard to recover a ReiserFS partition on that drive (did you know that ReiserFS has an fsck program? I do now!). I copied the data off of the drive, reformatted it, and put the data back. It worked fine for about 2 weeks, and then it got really bad (but still logging errors). I replaced the drive and have had no problems since. It was a 3 year old Seagate IDE drive (a little young by my standards and experience). Now, I have nothing but SCSI hard drives (I have yet to lose one of these, but I know that nothing lasts forever). Later, Andy -- Andy Stewart, Founder Worcester Linux Users' Group Worcester, MA USA http://www.wlug.org
XP, huh ? Well, I haven't toyed with that beastie yet, but I have had 2 IDE disks fail under NT 4.0 (one at woek, one at home). Symptoms included sluggish file access, lockups, and BSODs. Look in Event Viewer, under System, for disk errors. If the disk is going bad, you'll see many of these (both correctable and non). Hope this helps. PaulG -- Paul Gelinas MCP, MCP+I, MCSE pgelinas@attbi.com
participants (3)
-
Andy Stewart -
dibb_jim＠emc.com -
Paul Gelinas