Hard Drive Problem

Kirk

I am still having trouble with the hard drive in my home server... I was discussing this with some of you in IRC the other day, so maybe you already heard about the problem.

I had Debian and ReiserFS on the hard drive, and while copying files to it, the hard drive suddenly just died. The system locked up, and after rebooting, I got some error about "the file system is not clean" and I gave Linux 2 hours to pretend to be scanning it. At this point, I have downloaded utilities from Western Digital, and have run all sorts of tests on the hard drive, to no avail. All the tests are coming out just fine. I can format the drive with FAT32, I just seem to be having trouble making Linux and BSD read the drive.

To give you an idea of what the problem is as of this point in time, here are some screenshots, taken in consecutive order, from an attempt at installing FreeBSD 6.1-Release.









At this point, I am open to any suggestions you may have regarding making FreeBSD successfully install on this drive.

-Kirk

Bash

I think it is dead.

Kirk

Bash wrote:

I think it is dead.

I was able to make a partition with fdisk though, and format it as FAT32, without any problems. I've tried this drive in a different system too, and received the same kind of errors.

-Kirk

Bash

I can sense a "omg bsd and linux sux" post coming soon. Aside from that, you might be better off just using another drive.

Kirk

Bash wrote:

I can sense a "omg bsd and linux sux" post coming soon. Aside from that, you might be better off just using another drive.

You think I have 120GB hard drives laying around? I could easily just use one of the other drives, but I have no other real use for this... as my new PC has all its IDE slots used up by the DVD drives, and I'd rather just use it in the server. You don't have any other suggestions as to what could bring this problem about?

-Kirk

UglynGrey

What exactly is the motherboard model and revision and do you know the rev of the current BIOS? I have a thought this may relate to the way BIOS is set to handle and pass on drive translation but can't tell without pulling the BIOS apart a little. If you can tell me what Mobo and BIOS, I'll do a little research for you.

Q

You could always run something like SR6 on it and see what that turns up. If nothing else ITS error messages might be helpful

-Q

Wipeout

OMG BSD AND LINUX SUX!

Lol, yeah it looks like a dying drive. I have a drive that is slowly dying, its a 4 GB with 1.7 GB left of usable sectors. That or, the OSes aren't being setup right. I don't know enough about it.

Kirk

As a followup for you all, I have managed to get this hard drive to work properly again. Don't flame me for this one, but by running Red Hat Linux on the server, I can get the drive to format. So, that's what I will do until I come up with something better.

-Kirk

Wipeout

I guess a lot of people hate RH?

I liked it when I was using it. Never had config problems, same with FC.

Q

I think what most people dislike about it (FC at least) is that it is a large distribution.

-Q

UPONCPU

Speaking of hard drive problems, I've got one that I cannot write to the boot sector on.


Just sayin'.

Kirk

I'm just running RedHat Linux 9 right now... X_X I don't like it though, as I'm used to Debian and FreeBSD... I'd like to have one of those two OSes running. I have decided that I will try to fix the drive's geometry using Partition Magic 8 tomorrow. If that fails, I'll just have to do something else, but at least now I know that there is a problem, what the problem is, and maybe I'm a step closer to fixing it... and hey, that's progress.

-Kirk

BOD

What brand is the drive?

Kirk

BOD wrote:

What brand is the drive?

It's a Western Digital Caviar.

---

As an update, I ran Partition Magic on the drive, and somehow fixed my problem. I have Ubuntu Edgy Eft running on the server once again. http://www.voyager.unitedfederationofga ... hpsysinfo/.

-Kirk

BOD

I'd have downloaded their software and zero'd the thing to clear any shit leftover.

Kirk

BOD wrote:

I'd have downloaded their software and zero'd the thing to clear any shit leftover.

I tried that, and it didn't have any effect, which is why I used Partition Magic.

-Kirk

JackTheStripper

If it only works in certain OSes, then I'd say you're doing something wrong.

Kirk

JackTheStripper wrote:

If it only works in certain OSes, then I'd say you're doing something wrong.

I did eventually get it to work. Incidentally, there is nothing to do wrong. Insert the CD, boot up the PC, and it didn't finish booting. (in Ubuntu's case that is). Nothing to do wrong... The important thing is that it's fixed now.

-Kirk