Is my Hdrive OK?????
 

Hello ,back after some abscence,from this Brainy Forum.

I have a WinXp machine withan additional HDrive that has Suse 10.0 on it.
A rather dated ,but workable machine,,, socket 370 Mobo ,384 mb ram ,Celeron 866 ,DVD-rom and dvd-RW.
drive setup is XP is ist master, DVD-RW is ist slave,, DVDrom is 2nd IDE Master ,and Suse HDr is 2nd slave.



When I disconnect my Main HDrive WinXP <by power plug> and use my Suse 10.0 drive <configured on the 2nd iDE channel> as a master<by changing jumpers ,, I get this funny message.

Kernel (hd0,0)/ bootvmlinuz root = /dev/hd4/

ide=no dma apm =off acpi=off
al noresume selinux = 0 vga=norm
barrier=off no smp no apic
max cpus =03

[Linux - bz image , setup = Ox1400
,size0x17a821]

initrd( hd0,0,boot/initrd

[Linux-initrd @0xdec8000,
0x127c13bytes


Uncompressing Linux

crc error

--System Halted


HMMM ,this is telling me something is wrong!!.

I can understand the ide=no dma and apm =off stuff,

but what could be the rest???


Thanks , Chilibowl

It sounds like a failing drive to me. You can try mounting it with a live CD to recover the data you want. Then I'd download the Ultimate Boot CD and use the hard disk tools to test the drive. It may just be a few bad blocks that you can work around for the time being. But I'd make sure I have backups of anything important...

I would check it on the first IDE channel first. Some of the older motherboards are picky about where drives are. Some of the older cables are also setup so that the cable decides which drive is master. Where 1st drive socket on cable is master and second is slave (or the other way around). If you have such a cable and have your drive hooked to the slave socket it would react like this.

CRC error indicates a hardware fault. Could be controller, or cable, or drive. Changing cable is cheapest/quickest; try that first. Also, as lazlow suggested, watch out for cable select issues and make sure your drive jumpers are consistent with the cable you are using.

You can establish that controller is/is not involved by trying another HD in the same location.

If you wind up concluding it is the drive, it would be worth trying Spinrite on it, if you have access to a copy. Spinrite is not cheap, but often works. However, given the price of IDE drives, if you don't have critical data at risk it probably isn't worth purchasing spinrite.