[CentOS] CentOS 4.3 occasionally locking up accessing IDE drive

Sun Apr 2 14:30:40 UTC 2006
William L. Maltby <BillsCentOS at triad.rr.com>

On Sat, 2006-04-01 at 21:56 -0800, Bart Schaefer wrote:
> On 4/1/06, William L. Maltby <BillsCentOS at 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
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