OT: Hardware troubleshooting

[Jamon Camisso]

William O'Higgins wrote:
  > 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.

Sounds like a powersupply problem. If you poweroff and the problem 
always occurs when restarting but not when rebooting I'd say that power 
would be the first thing to check.

> 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.
> 

Is this entering the BIOS after a reboot or a cold start?


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