system hangs BEFORE booting
 

Hi everyone,
I've been having a problem booting up a Slackware 10.2 laptop lately, and I'm a little worried that it's the beginnings of a serious hardware problem. Usually when powering on the machine I get the IBM splash screen and then a blinking cursor for a second and lilo loads linux. Lately -- for the last week or two -- the system occasionally hangs on the splash screen, or on the blinking cursor before "LILO" appears, with the hard disk not spinning up and booting the system. Sometimes ctl+alt+del gets it going, other times, I have had to remove the battery and power on again for the hard disk to start working. No other problems have appeared, except for some occasional periodic clicking sounds from the hard disk.

Is the disk going bad? Is it a more serious hardware issue?

I've been using smartmontools lately and have it set to send messages to the root account if trouble is detected with the HD, but so far there have been no reports.

System specs: IBM thinkpad R-40, about 4 1/2 years old. I replaced the original hard drive after it started to fail maybe 1 1/2 years ago. Running Slackware 10.2 with a 2.6.15.4 kernel. 80 GB harddisk with three partitions one for /home, one for the rest of the system, one for swap space, partitioned when I installed Slack onto a new disk 1 1/2 years ago.

The only tinkering I've done lately is install a new RAM module, and the problem did not occur immediately afterward.

I'd appreciate any comments or suggestions or advice...

-geo

Your hard drive is as good as dead. Backup and get yourself a new one :O

OK. Thanks. This forces me to upgrade to Slackware 11.0 :D

-geo

Just got a new hard drive and installed slackware 11 last night. Everything seemed OK -- no problems booting the system up. Now I turn on the machine and I can't get past the IBM splash screen. Did I just get unlucky and get a bum drive or might this be a sign of other fried bits inside?

-geo

Did you test it without new RAM module?

Booted right up without the new RAM. I'll report back if the problem reappears.

Thanks!

Problem back again. Just tried rebooting after a few minutes of running and can't get the system to start.
Any further possibilities?

-geo

Well, this is long shot and you may not want to take all the trouble, considering results are not guaranteed. These Thinkpads are generally high-quality, except one weakness. Sometimes they have some sort of contacts oxidation problem. I had similar failure with my T23 long time ago. The solution was to take it into pieces, carefully clean all contacts and put it back together. It was so long time ago I even do not remember how I cleaned it, maybe it was ethanol. Maybe something else. I followed directions I found on the internet.

I'll look into that when I get a chance. Thanks again.

-geo