On Feb 4, 2005, at 12:59 PM, Charles Davis wrote:
A "Board" logic problem ? I can't envision a set of circumstances where 'Board' problems would manifest itself as a whole sector write to a hard disk.
a bad drive controller? Certainly.
However I can think of a possible 'program' glitch that would act this way. See if you follow this.
To control 'boot' location, there are things set (program parts in NVRAM, and PRAM, AND the boot sector of the target HD for selecting WHICH of several partitions to boot from.) This is what the 'Boot device, and System Disk' programs are supposed to work on.
Now suppose that as a part of the program, it reads the 'boot sector' makes any needed changes and then writes the corrected 'boot sector' back to the disk.
Examination of the 'boot sector' reveals "no changes needed" --- Here is where the problem comes in!!!!
IF the programmer decided that there WOULD be a write cycle, and mistakenly assumed that to "NOT write something" (no change needed) was the same as to 'write nothing', you can see where the 'nulls would come from.
What say ye!!
Then that's a firmware programmer who should have been fired, because the system would never boot.
You're over-analyzing.
Problems like this, with the boot sector getting zeroed out like you describe are from a hardware error, either on the motherboard or the drive controller.
This is old, old OLD technology for computers; we got it down pat a long time ago.
Now, a dying or dead PRAM battery MIGHT cause booting problems. I've not heard before of the boot sector getting nulled out before, but weirder thigns have happened.
-- Bruce Johnson University of Arizona College of Pha acy Information Technology Group
Institutions do not have opinions, merely customs
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