On Sat, Apr 19, 2008 at 02:59:43PM -0700, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > I tried to boot that disk last night and it sounded like it was > alternately spinning up and then spinning down. The BIOS did not > recognize it properly, and we never got to LILO/GRUB.
That probably means that your disk is gone. If you're really really interested in testing this, you can put it into another computer and check it, but all of these symptoms indicate that it is time to RMA/replace. > However, the other fly in the ointment is that the floppy drive > stopped working. This was a couple days after it had last been used to > make an MS-DOS boot floppy. I swapped in another drive, which worked > long enough to boot DOS twice. Then it stopped, too. So I don't know > if it's a cable or the disk controller (which is on the motherboard). > I'm also not really sure how to test it. Probably the cable, especially if you've been mucking around inside the case. Unless your BIOS is really extra-special defective, the drive controller on the MB should be fine. It is conceivable that the drive controller on the floppy drive itself is broken, but check cabling first. > Given the flaky (to be charitable) floppy, I wonder if the problem is > the drive or the drive controller. Floppy controllers and HDD controllers are two very different components - a failure in one doesn't often indicate a failure in the other (again, unless your BIOS basically doesn't work [1]). > This is waaay beyond anything I've ever done. I do have a backup of > the home directories from the recently-failed /dev/hda that I can > restore easily. However, I created them via cp -p to a blank /dev/hdb > installed for the purpose. Real high-tech, huh? You'd never believe I > used to write assembler for fun. Use rsync with a ton of flags instead. You get better preservation of metadata. Ben -- Ben Stern This post does not represent FTI, even if I claim it does. Neener neener.
