On Sat, 2006-04-01 at 21:56 -0800, Bart Schaefer wrote:
On 4/1/06, William L. Maltby BillsCentOS@triad.rr.com wrote:
Re the overnight diag, are environmental conditions similar to when you encounter problems? Temp, power "brown out", etc?
Yep. The PC was custom-built less than 12 weeks ago, it's on a UPS only a couple of weeks older than that, the case power supply is supposed to handle up to twice as many drives as I have in there, and the IDE cables are brand new and firmly seated.
Secondly, are your current HD configurations consistent with what is actually on the drive?
AFAICT, yes. And the other drive on the same IDE cable, also a Maxtor, is working fine.
Well, then it sounds like it's isolated on that drive. Did you do the sfdisk -l to see if the geometry stored on-disk matches BIOS/ I don't know that it would affect it, but leave no tern un-stoned (old joke).
My next suggestion is to see if the problem can be reproduced... HOLD THE PHONE! One other thing to consider/try! Have you put this drive on another IDE port and tried all the same things? Since we are passed the "easy" answers, we must include the "obvious" too. Is the jumpering correct for how it is installed? 1) Is the MB one that uses "cable select"? Is the jumper appropriately CS/MAST/SLAVE? Is it on a cable with another drive or CD? Are they jumpered appropriately CS/MST/SLAVE? Are they active when the problems are detected (since the diags shows no prob and I assume nothing else runs then)?
Resist the urge to arbitrarily reject any potential problem cause due to "I know it can't be because...". Those are the ones that get you.
Also, don assume that new=good. New eqpt has "shakedown cruise" because it is inherently less reliable that tried and true stuff. Is this the first time this cable/port has been used, for example. Is this the first time (or not) that the power connectors from the PS have been used? Any "in-line connectors" added in (like to power other fans, etc.)?
Last ditch effort to prove drive one way or the other: put it into another unit and try similar operations, See if diags acts the same, can you try copy operation and get errors again? If so, good be something is now flaky in the drive, like a connector loosened or gone bad during handling as it was moved.
HTH and GL Bill