System donot boot if 2nd hdd attached and massege starting system logger

GOBINDO0948 · 07-05-2009, 01:28 PM

Hi all i am a new user
i am using rhel4 in a p4 machine everything was right till i added a new 80gb ide hdd as secendery hdd.after attaching new hdd to the system it hangs during boot after giving massage starting system logger
and system boot normally if i remove new hdd

any clue ?

thanks and regards
govind

Johnnie J · 07-05-2009, 02:40 PM

Is your primary hard drive set as master and your secondary hard drive set as slave? Are you putting them on the same IDE cable?

ronlau9 · 07-05-2009, 03:04 PM

There might be a other reason , because it was not there during installation it is not mentioned in you're fstab
Try using a Live Cd to add to you're fstab

Robhogg · 07-05-2009, 03:09 PM

A few thoughts:

How old / robust is your power supply? Could it be that the new drive is just overloading it? Do you have another system you could try attaching the drive to, to check whether it's the drive or the PC/OS?
As it's hanging after starting the system logger, there might be something useful in the logs. Do you have a live disk (e.g. Knoppix, or a Ubuntu / Fedora install disk) available? After a failed boot, try booting from this and looking at the last few lines of /var/log/kern.log and /var/log/messages (for starters)
If that shows nothing, you could try scanning the disk. If it is already formatted, you could use fsck -cvf to check for any problems. If it isn't, running fdisk -l as root should at least show you if it is being recognised properly. You could also try smartctl -a <device> if the live disk has the S.M.A.R.T monitoring tools available (or you are able to install them)
If it is a blank, unformatted drive, you could try partitioning and formatting it,(with a tool like Gparted), and then give it a mount point in fstab. It shouldn't really make a difference, but you never know