From owner-freebsd-questions Sat Oct 12 9:21:26 2002 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 4CA2137B401 for ; Sat, 12 Oct 2002 09:21:25 -0700 (PDT) Received: from infinity.aesredfish.net (ns1.aesredfish.net [65.168.0.12]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 4A8C543ECD for ; Sat, 12 Oct 2002 09:21:24 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from wmoran@potentialtech.com) Received: from potentialtech.com (mhope-dhcp-65-168-1-181.dashfast.com [65.168.1.181]) by infinity.aesredfish.net (8.11.6/8.11.0) with ESMTP id g9CGLIW11780 for ; Sat, 12 Oct 2002 12:21:18 -0400 Message-ID: <3DA84DE2.9000104@potentialtech.com> Date: Sat, 12 Oct 2002 12:29:22 -0400 From: Bill Moran User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; FreeBSD i386; en-US; rv:1.0rc1) Gecko/20020502 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: questions@freebsd.org Subject: [OT] how to isolate hardware failure with ATA Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG I think the computer that I'm currently working on has hardware that is about to fail. But I'm not sure if it's the mobo or the HDD. In the past week, this scenerio has happened twice. The system just freezes. Not completely, mind you, but anything that needs to use the HDD doesn't work. (it's weird, you can still type in an Xterm, but it can't execute the commands because it can't get the binaries off the HDD) One time that it did this, I hard booted and and the BOIS claimed that there was no HDD, so I poped the cover to check for loose cables, found none, and (figuring I was hosed with a bad HDD) it booted up OK this time. The other time, the hard boot resulted in a successful reboot. Prior to this week, this computer has been 100% reliable for about 2 years now. So, I'm assuming the problem is one of two things: HDD or ATA controller on the mobo. Does anyone have any advice on how to isolate the cause of the problem? I'm on a budget and I'd really like to replace _only_ the part that's failing, but I'm not sure how to isolate the problem, and I don't have any spare hardware to swap out. -- Bill Moran Potential Technologies http://www.potentialtech.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message