Date: Mon, 3 Jan 2000 08:59:14 -0800 (PST) From: Mark Hendriks <markh@lon.imag.net> To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Crippled Hard Drive Message-ID: <200001031659.IAA28456@superman.imag.net>
next in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
Yes, the subject line is correct; my hard drive has not "failed" in an outright sense, it has merely become crippled, although seriously so. My system has an Intel 440BX motherboard, and a single Fujitsu IDE hard drive. On this hard drive, I have FreeBSD, Linux, and DOS/Win3.1. I do not have a boot manager installed, as the BIOS in my system provides this function. The trouble began when I was using Netscape under FreeBSD. I had edited the bookmark file, and when I tried to save it, the operation took a very long time. Given my experience with Netscape, I thought it was just Netscape, so I quit the program. The hard drive continued to spin for an unusual amount of time after I quit Netscape, and KDE itself was taking a long time to respond to events. I was not running any other applications. I tried to quit KDE, but after the hard drive spun for quite a while, the system just hung. At this point, I hit the reset button. I tried rebooting into FreeBSD. The boot process failed early on, but it got far enough to show that it at least got something from the hard drive. The line beginning with "/kernel text=..." came up, but it took even longer than it does when booting from floppy. At this point, I assumed that it was just the file system that was trashed. I tried booting into DOS. DOS booted, but very slowly. Win3.1 failed, reporting "general failure" on C:. From DOS, I could access the hard disk, but very slowly. I have determined that the floppy & CD are working okay, it's just the hard drive. Has anyone seen this type of thing before, where a hard drive becomes crippled, rather than failing? Is there anything that can cause this type of failure, other than just plain hardware failure, such as improper system configuration? I've been told that FreeBSD 3.3 doesn't support UDMA; this was a UDMA drive; could this have caused the problem? I am holding on to this slim hope that someone here can tell me something that will mean that I don't have to buy a new hard drive. Am I dreaming? (My system is still under warranty, but I had already developed a strong mistrust of the store where I purchase my system.) Even if you can only provide partial answers, I would gladly appreciate any answers/advice you can give. Mark ------------------------------------------------------------ bogh tlhInganpu', SuvwI'pu' moj, Hegh - "Klingons are born, live as warriors, then die." source: The Klingon Way, Mark Okrand, 1996 ------------------------------------------------------------ To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?200001031659.IAA28456>