Re: hardware doctors!

[Sajjad Zaidi <sajjad@example.com>]

Do u know what make are the drives? The clicking is pretty common on Western
Digitals. The ones Ive used somehow start working again after a few hard
taps. Just hope youre not using Fujitsu or some other unreliable make.
Fujitsus seem to give a lot of read/write problems, bad blocks and physical
errors, even on new ones.

You should be able to send it to the maker if its still under manufacturers warranty (usually around 3 years) or try to get a disk utility (usually only works in dos) form the maker to repair defects if its not too serious.

If you can boot to a shell you should be able to run e2fsck on the drive although im not sure how to check for bad blocks with it.

Good luck.

A.Sajjad Zaidi
 

Ulrike Schmidt wrote:

>  The patient
> is a Aptiva with two harddrives, one is running Windows (hda), the other
> one RedHat Linux (hdb). Since I did not manage to connect Redhat to ISDN
> I am doing my mail with Windows. When I came back after a long vacation
> and started up Windows I heard strange sounds comming out of what I think
> was one of the harddrives. It was kind of a loud scratching, and sometimes
> also some strange clicking, and seemed to me as if the read/write head
> was going long ways. But I thought maybe the machine was always so loud
> and I had just forgotten over using more silent machines the last weeks,
> and Windows was running without any problems. When I tried to boot linux
> I got the the usual startup messages up to: Starting
> X Font server: But
> then (I was not quick enough with copying by hand, there might be some
> small mistakes): Starting
> linuxconf hdb: irq timeout: status=0xd0 {Busy}ide0:
> reset: successhdb: irq timeout:
> status=0xd0 {Busy}ide0:
> reset timed out, status =0x80hdb:
> status timout: status=0x80 {Busy}hdb:
> dirve not ready for commandend_request:
> I/O eerror, dev 03:46 (hdb, sector 7160)hdb:
> drive not ready for command ...
> and an endless repetition of some of the lines with different sector numbers.
> I had to take the machine down by pulling the cord. I thought maybe some
> cables got loose and finally dared to open the case, but all I could reach
> to seemed ok and anyway I have only vague ideas what is where, but my impression
> is that the strange sounds are comming from hda and nothing from hdb, which
> would make sense to me, since hdb seems not be ready for command. What
> might be the problem, what could I do, any recommendations? As
> always a lot of thanks in advance, Uli