[olug] Hard Drive Failure?

[William E. Kempf]

Jay Swackhamer said:
>
> In the past I've had the same experiences that ended up being
> once bad memory, another time the HD, another MB
>
> If the bios wont recognize it, it could be either, the easiest way to
> pinpoint it would be to test the components in another machine.
>
> Or boot from another media and run WD's diagnostic's.
>
> You could verify the hardware by booting from one of gentoo's
> live cd's or RH's boot cd and run a 'media check'...........

Jay was nice enough to offer his time and some equipment in his shop to
help me diagnose the problems.  Unfortunately, we couldn't find anything
definative (the HD seemed to work flawlessly in his machines, and
continued to show, at least minor, problems in mine, but the diagnostics
we could run showed nothing wrong with the CPU or memory, leaving only the
onboard IDE as a possibility).  I've replaced the HD, and thus far
everything is running with out incident (performance is much better, no
lock ups for 2 days of use, and no log messages).  Of course, the other HD
went a week before totally giving out, so there's still a possibility I'll
find it to be the IDE.

The main reason for this post is to publicly thank Jay for his help.  It
was much appreciated.

-- 
William E. Kempf