OT: Hardware troubleshooting

[William O'Higgins]

My desktop machine is showing signs of flakiness, and I'm looking for
advice as to how I should hunt the culprit(s).

Symptom:  When I boot I'll get a sad beep and a funny hard drive noise,
and then the BIOS will fail to detect one of my hard drives (a
relatively new WD 40G (IDE, slave)) which incidently is where / and /usr
live.  So I get a boot prompt, and then a complaint about the root dive
not being present.  Most times, a reboot and everything will come up
fine.

If I enter the BIOS, I notice a slight delay before the BIOS can see the
drive.  The same behavior happens if the BIOS auto-detects the drive or
if I preset the cable to expect an IDE HD.

I haven't had a chance to run fsck on the drive (I'll boot up from
Knoppix and do that tonight), but I'm looking for advice as to how to
isolate my problem without throwing a lot of money into buying
replacement parts to swap around in testing.  I don't have a spare HD
kicking around right now, nor a motherboard.  The IDE cables seem to be
well seated.

Any input is appreciated.  Thanks.
-- 

yours,

William

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