I am currently in possession of an HP Omnibook 6000 laptop. I am its second owner, so it is well worn, but it seems to suffer from an unusual problem:

It first had this problem while running SimplyMEPIS. It would suddenly and inexplicably lock up completely, while the hard drive access light would turn on and stay on. I would almost always be forced to reboot it, and it would sometimes take two or three tries to reboot. As time went on, the problem grew worse, until it was a near daily phenomenon. I had thought it was a hard drive failure (my old drive was VERY old); so at the point when I had to run exclusively from a LiveCD, I replaced it's old 20Gb IBM Travelstar 2.5" drive with a new Hitachi Travelstar 40Gb 2.5" drive. I also switched distros: I started using Gentoo.

This seemed to fix the problem for a while; but the problem has returned. It isn't as bad as it was, but it's severe enough to make me wonder what is causing it. So far I've only had to reboot the machine twice, but I'm sure it's the same problem as what I had with the IBM drive.

I no longer think that hard drive failure was the cause of the problem, and software can probably be ruled out, as I used two different distributions with entirely different structures, methods of package management, versions of software, etc... But I do think it's a hardware failure of some type. Could the hard drive controller/interface be causing such a problem?

If you have so much as a guess at this, please post. I need all the help I can get. I don't have much money, and I need to know if it's time to trash this machine.

Thanks much,

Jeremy Davis Pedersen

A harddrive controller failure seems feasible. It also might be an IRQ conflict... check your IRQs with '/sbin/lspci -vv'.

But If I were you, I woul dstart shopping for a new notebook.

Try running memtest86+ from a LiveCD: can't hurt, but might be enlightening.

Ok. It doesn't look like an IRQ conflict, I checked with lspci. I'm leaning more towards hard drive controller failure at this point. I'll keep you updated on the results of memtest86+

I'm going to give memtest a go right now...

Well, 15 passes of memtest86+ didn't return any bad sectors in my memory, so it looks like things are OK there too. If my hard drive's bran new, it's not an IRQ conflict, and it's not a memory error, then it looks like (motherboard side) hard drive controller faillure is my best guess.

On the upside, even if it IS the IDE controller on my motherboard, the other I/O controllers seem to be working...

Time to shop for a new laptop.

Thanks much,

Jeremy Pedersen