OT: Hardware troubleshooting

[William O'Higgins]

On Mon, Aug 08, 2005 at 01:12:25PM -0400, Jamon Camisso wrote:
>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.

Good idea.  If the machine has been up for several hours it does not
seem to want to find the HD even after reboot - but an hour later it
comes up just 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.
>>
>
>Is this entering the BIOS after a reboot or a cold start?

It doesn't matter - the machine rarely comes up cleanly on the first
try, warm or cold.
-- 

yours,

William

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