Hardware Wars, round 2

[Peter King]

Well, my home Linux box has developed a strange habit. Twice
now it has just... stopped... while I was doing inoffensive things. And
what's more, it wouldn't boot up: the machine would go through the
full BIOS tests, read out a message saying "Checking DMI pool" or
some such, and then wait forever. No grub stage loading, but also
no message saying that a boot record couldn't be found. It would
just sit there. The first time I tried many things, the last of which was
to open the case and reseat everything -- after which it booted up,
so I though there was just a loose connection.

Well, not this time. The first thing (and the fourth and fifth and seventh)
was to (re)check all the connections. No good. Then I booted from a
SysRescue DVD, chrooted into the regular root drive, and everything
looked just fine. Lots more poking, but nothing worked until I manually
called up a Boot Device Selection menu from the BIOS, then selected
"Hard Drive" and then the particular hard drive I have the rootfs on.
Voila! It booted up without a hiccup anywhere.

What is going on?

The motherboard/BIOS is about three months old, a GIgabyte I put in
after two ASUS motherboards failed on me. I also changed the CPU,
and the power supply, and added several different drives.

For the record, the system is up-to-date (as of this morning) stable
Gentoo, running 2.6.35 with grub 0.97-r10. I can't imagine the rest
of my configuration matters since the problem, at least the immediate
problem, is that the drive won't (reliably) boot up. Or maybe this is a
sign that I should get a new boot drive. Probably not a bad idea. If
only it weren't so much trouble to clone boot drives...

-- 
Peter King
peter.king-H217xnMUJC0sA/PxXw9srA at public.gmane.org
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://gtalug.org/
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://gtalug.org/wiki/Mailing_lists