I moved to southern cali a year back and had some issues with the system i brought with me. This led me to using my wifes system which happened to be on XP since she refused to learn linux even though i pointed out that there really isnt anything for her to learn. All the same to me, i managed to get her to agree to it a month or 2 back and put on Sabayon Linux. Well, I tried anyways. After 3 or 4 failed attempts, I gave in and bought a new HDD, a 500GB Seagate PATA. It was defective from the get go with what I figured was spindle failure, linux and windows both failed on it and I brought it back for another of the same exact kind. This one worked fine, up until today.

This morning, there was a power outage, everything went out and the system rebooted, just fine (I was on SSH earlier today and watching a movie off of it). Well, later in the day, there was a problem where the power started to flicker a bit. Lights dimmed, TVs would dim and shut off and I didnt even think about the computer until now. I went to get into it and it had no route to the host, then my network failed. Rebooted the router and checked the system, black screen with nothing on it. Rebooted the system and the HDD, my guess is the new one since it's also the main system drive, starting making a weird clicking noise. The system failed to see the drive and grub gave me an error. Rebooted, this time it clicked but the system saw the drive, and grub came up. Selected Sabayon and hit enter, then the drive went nuts and starting clicking more and more and it never got past Initializing the Kernel. One more try and this time it got past it, but came up with about 30 or 40 I/O errors with loading modules. then it just stopped again.

What does this mean? any ideas? I dont want to go through all of this crap again since it took me a month of here and there, this and that touches to get the system serving where it is. The last thing I need is to try it again. I cant do much past 8pm since my room mate conks out at 8 and I cant do anything until 11a when I wake up, then I leave for work by 12 or 1 and never have enough time, or combined days off, to accomplish anything.

And yes, I do love linux, I just hate setting it up every time, since I prefer Gentoo and Sabayon over Fedora and the like.

Worst comes to work, I'll get on a livecd and move the data to windows again until I build my new system in feb.

Specs, in case anyone wants to know
AMD 2800+, 2GB ram, 1 500GB HDD (main system/general storage and download drive) 1 160GB HDD, 2 80GB HDDs (1 holds the windows system, one was storage with windows). the 80s and 160 are on an ide controller card. nvidia 5200fx agp. onboard sound and lan. plugged in direct to the router. nothing special at all...

The other problem being, i've tried it before, if i try it on another drive, it will still fail from i/o since another drive fails. I've checked and switched IDE cables, checked and switched the power cable, all seems well. i had a different ps in there before, but it wouldnt boot with 4 hdds and 2 dvdrws, but it did fine with 3hdds and 1 dvdrw, i'll probably try this again tomorrow, but for now, im assuming the psu is fine since it worked fine in my other systems before it.


Any help would be appreciated,
-John

Wow, sorry to read about your woes. Try downloading a diagnostic disc from the manufacturers website and testing the drive with it. Maybe buying a different brand of hard drive is the way forward.

so, what filesystem were you using? just curious, might be an idea to change it to a journaling fs if it ain't already. so, what i'd do is grab a live distro, use it to fix the drive, then have a working system again. i use kubuntu to fix slack.
my ancient ups keeps my system going through brownouts, so none of that power outage killing my drives, though warzone does a decent repeated attempt. my ups isn't connected to the shutdown routines yet, i haven't figured it out, but there's been no troubles here with long outages. yaknow, you can get power supplies with integrated ups batteries, they're cool, but me, i want to have a transformer at the wall to supply dc to my systems, my idea of the cadillac ups.

symptoms say probably a corrupted file system. Not likely a HD failure as described. Possibly controller failure, but I doubt it.

Use a rescue disk and run fsck on the HD.

Not that I'm disagreeing, but ...

He mentioned the hard drive clicking. If it's the clicking I'm thinking of, these are hardware level seek errors, and his hard drive is probably physically damaged.

He also mentioned that BIOS didn't see the drive immediately. Hardware issue, and nothing to do with file system.

The fact that he's saying he's also trying other drive, which also fail, indicates he may have a problem with his mainboard.

Ok, well, maybe I am disagreeing ... just a little ...

pyr02k1,
I recommend that you move your drives to another machine and test for function. You are risking file system corruption by connecting them to the broken system, if it is indeed a half-working mainboard/controller problem.

Good luck ... I know it sucks.

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Hard drives clicking on initial seeks are definitely bad. Use a Live CD or otherwise get the Hard disk out of the computer, copy over all important files and data to a good drive, and then run S.M.A.R.T. or other appropriate drive diagnostics, and see what happens.

If the motherboard is bad, would a live CD work?

Those would be reported on the console and in the system logs. You'll also get clicking sometimes when a block is corrupted and the drive is trying to re-read it. Block corruption is not uncommon with abrupt power failures.

Actually, he did report I/O errors in his original post; I missed that.

power failures/brownouts can lead to illegal states. When he restarted the system the drive was seen.

I see where he wrote that, but when I first read it I didn't understand it to mean he was swapping another drive in and seeing the same error. Actually, I still don't understand it to mean that, but it could be what he means.

I should have read the post a bit more carefully, I think. All things considered, it could indeed be a controller failure. I still doubt a HD failure. Testing the HD with SpinRite would probably answer that question, once the state of the controller is no longer in doubt.

Actually, I read and responded to the post in some haste because I myself am experiencing a hard drive issue on my system drive. About 6 weeks ago, I had to change the PS in this workstation, and - god help me - I dropped my system drive on a concrete floor. The sound of that drive has been different ever since, and now I am starting to get occasional I/O errors on it. I was addressing this while responding to this post. Shame on me.

In the meanwhile, looks like I am in the market for a replacement for my IBM Ultrastar 15K RPM Ultra-SCSI drive. *sigh*

Sorry about the delay and thanks for the responses. I was away for a few days between work and sleep and just figured to myself that I'd worry about it when I had a day off. I shut down the system 3 days ago after it booted into XP but wouldnt stop the clicking. Then I woke up this morning and decided it was worth one more shot before I ran around trying to save data. As odd as it sounds, it booted smoothly, no clicks, no spin-up and spin-downs, nothing but a smooth boot. This leaves me a bit confused and yet at the same time, I dont even want to know what happened since I know there wont be any way to fix it.

I ruled out the motherboard and power supply by plugging the drive into another system, it clicked as well. On the original system, I ran SeaTools from XP and did a short and long test, both said they'd passed. I checked the Log Information on the drive, and I think it was a heat issue on top of the power failure (just luck of the draw maybe). It shows the high of the drive at about 68C where as the other drives shows highs of 50-55 and one tops at around 61 (which also happens to be the one drive that I've taken back and forth across the country in checked baggage, like a fool, and fails on its own once in a while). I think I'll be getting a HDD cooler or another fan in the case shortly to combat that a bit. This actually makes me glad that I always hate putting the side covers back on the drive, I could imagine the heat it would produce without cooling from the side.

All the same, it works. But as a precaution, I'll be putting some form of HDD cooling in there and I'll also be purchasing a new UPS.


Thanks again,
-John

APC Back-UPS Pro units are on every one of my personal systems and, living in an area that can be prone to hurricane activity, they have been wonderful.

That said, I'd recommend looking into using apcupsd for UPS monitoring and power management/safe shutdowns during prolonged electrical outages.