I've just had a second hard drive fail in my machine, which to me seems a bit odd. The first wasn't a surprise as it's always acted strangely: back in the day, windows used to have issues writing to it, data would get swapped around (most peculiarly, the majority of my led zeppelin got swapped into some reef albums I had too, but that's another story...), so when that one keeled over, well, when its SMART status went from good to bad, I thought "oh well, it's been threatening to do that for about 3 years now, no big surprise it finally has". So I backed everything up to a USB drive, and unplugged it.

The strange thing is that the remaining drive in my computer has also gone bad, about a week after the first did. I recently acquired a "new" computer, that is to say it's quite old, but it's new to me, so the first drive was working ok-ish (see above) in the old computer, but actually died in the "new" one. The drive which has just failed is the one which was in the computer, so it's probably about 4 or 5 years old.

The most recent drive isn't even detected in the BIOS anymore, so there's no output from fdisk -l, and so running from a live CD (Slax), I can't access its data.

I'm just wondering if it could be something other than the drives themselves which is causing them drive to fail. I'd rather not keep plugging in drives and have them fail all the time! The processor fan is a bit noisy, I think the bearings are on their way out, but other than that, I can't see/hear anything that's wrong. Could the processor overheating be killing my hard drives? Would a bad stick of RAM do it? Or am I just unlucky?

Any thoughts very welcome!

edit: I've just remembered that the cd-writer in this box was also acting very strangely... it took absolutely ages to burn a cd's worth of data, but not before making me 3 or 4 coasters: neither k3b or nero could manage it properly. Does this sound like the motherboard's the issue? something IDE related?

pwc101

I would suspect a power supply problem. You can install lm_sensors to have a look at your voltages and temps. Getting lm_sensors dialed in to your motherboard can be a pain. I find that the relative #s are more important than absolute #s. ie if the 5 volt is running 5.96 v right after boot but is at 5.0 v 20 minutes later neither reading may be accurate, but the shift in voltage is indicative of a problem.

Lazlow

Thanks lazlow. Is there a liveCD which has lm_sensors included? At the moment I'm running off Slax, but I've also got DSL, Puppy and Knoppix knocking around, as well as the Slackware 10.2 install CDs (CD1 runs as a live CD I believe). Presumably I could install it to one of those if it's not included by default? I've still got the old computer, so I can pull the power supply out of that if lm_sensor shows that's the problem.

Ah, everyone loves cobbling stuff together!...

pwc101

It is fairly popular so it should be available for most distros. I am running FC4+5 right now but I think it was available for suse as well.

Good Luck

Lazlow