System Recovery

[michael miller]

About two years ago I had an equally frustrating hardware problem that
seemed to come out of nowhere that finally resolved after about the 10th
reinstall of both XP and FC6. About 6 mo later I had a recurrence and
was able to figure out that the device names of my two sata hard drives
had been interchanged.  In retrospect just prior to both situations I
had opened the case and done something trivial inside before the
problems arose.  What had happened is that I had apparently bumped one
of the sata data cables enough to get a bad contact during initial boot
that fan or other vibration reseated later.  In the second incident I
was then able to recover by swapping the id of the drives after
carefully reseating the sata cables.  Since then any time the case is
open the sata cables get checked.  No recurrence since.  There have got
to be better options than those connectors.

Mike Miller
On Thu, 2008-07-17 at 09:56 -0400, Jarod Wilson wrote:
> On Thu, 2008-07-17 at 09:33 -0400, Labitt, Bruce wrote:
> > Found something interesting in my feeble attempts to bring up the system
> > again.  It looks like the DVD writer is responsible or non-compliant
> > with my version of linux (Scientific Linux 5.2 - "RHEL5.2").  Installing
> > linux with the DVD writer caused a kernel panic.  If anyone wants more
> > details I can provide a few.  
> > 
> > I took out the errant hardware and swapped in the old DVD-ROM.  No
> > kernel panic and the system is installing now.  FWIW I am installing a
> > new system on the 300GB SATA drive.
> > 
> > This leads me to believe that wanting to write DVDs caused the whole
> > system to crash to begin with.  Arrgh.  
> > 
> > After this is all done, I will disconnect the new disk and try a rescue
> > on the old disk - without the damn DVD writer.  Hmm - are there any SATA
> > DVD writers that work?
> 
> Yep, I've got a sata Plextor PX-755A or something like that which works
> great.
> 
> > I would not have figured that this drive would
> > have caused the havoc to begin with.
> 
> Hrm, me neither.
>