I had a hard drive failure earlier today. After getting back from the store with a replacement drive, I shutdown the system, replaced the drive, and powered it back up. At the Grub prompt, I edited the command line to go into single user mode -- to partition the new disk and restore from backups, etc. -- but once the system gets to the "Loading initial ramdisk ..." message the system just hangs. Booting from the installation DVD and trying to run the rescue system also hangs. The memory test works (no failures) so the system is able to run something but any attempts to run Linux results in it hanging.

The last time I saw something like this was way back when an old Pentium Pro-based system refused to boot. That one turned out to have some of those bad capacitors on the motherboard.

Any ideas as to something I can try to get a response from the system?

TIA

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Rick

remove all the hardware pieces you not need to boot (second disk, sound card .... CD/DVD). Boot into bios and check if everything was recognized. Remove all parts (including video card and memory) and put them back (maybe into another slot - sometimes that can help too).
Try to boot from pendrive - if possible.
How old is this system?

Did that. No joy. BTW, I was incorrect when I said that the memory test was successful. When I let it run longer errors eventually started flying by. Pulled out one pair of memory cards, same result. Remove that pair and swapped the other pair back in. Same thing. Walking bit patterns, XOR tests, etc. all ran OK. Errors started when it got to the random memory access tests. I tested each board individually -- in different memory slots -- in an attempt to see if, perhaps, one board from each pair was bad. They ALL tested bad when the random memory test hit them. I'm thinking that the problem lies on the motherboard: bad "memory controller" (for lack of a better term). At this point, all I had in the system was the video card. If that's causing the problem, I'm kinda screwed as the motherboard is old enough that I'd have to track down a used card (AGP only or -- $DIETY forbid-- PCI).

Heh... actually my initial thought as to what could be causing the problem was that I might have left a drive in my external USB docking station. That will foul up the boot process if it's powered on and holding a drive when I boot. But it wasn't powered on and I then realized that I wouldn't have seen the Grub prompt if that had been the source of the trouble.

About ten years according to the information in the setup screens though I don't think I've been running it quite that long. So it's old but not old enough that I was ready to scrap it. I was hoping to use it as a sandbox system or a retro gaming platform in the near future. Not any more.

I'm likely going to make a trip to the local TigerDirect store this morning and pick up replacement parts (m'board, CPU, RAM, and SATA DVD writer). It'll probably cost me less for the parts than my time trying to troubleshoot this much further, putting off other work I should be doing, etc..

Thanks for your response, though.

Later...

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Rick

Memory could be caused by controller or maybe psu, very odd to be emi/rfi but still could be. Could be some bios settings also. From ram voltages to speeds. Also some usb settings can cause this.

You have to pass memory tests for a day or so before you go to any other test.