Howdy All,

I have a 2K box with 3 IDE drives and a cd-rom drive. The problem I've been having is: If the computer has been left running awhile (anywhere from 2 hours to 2 days) what appears to happen is physical disk 1, not 0, will only work intermittently. The 2K OS is installed on disk 0, while 2K3 evaluation, Red Hat 9, and some other software is installed on disk 1. I can usually predict when the drive is going to start acting up because I can hear a faint, slow, click....clack coming from inside the case. The sound itself is sporadic, and happens anywhere from once every 15 seconds to 15 minutes. It almost sounds like a hard drive head bouncing back-and-forth, not sure though. When I'm booted into 2K, 'IF' the drive starts acting up, it usually stalls 2K for a couple of seconds and then continues. If I'm booted into Linux or 2K3, it will eventually crash either of them.

The last thing that makes this weird: Sometimes when the computer boots, the bios doesn't recognize the two hard drives that are on the second IDE controller, disks 1 and 2, but most of the time it does. Disk 1 is the master on the second controller.

The System Monitor shows when the %Disk Time counter is used for all the physical and logical disks, and the 2K system is left idle, physical disk 1 continously shows the same amount of activity about every 5 seconds. And when I say 'about' the activity is always within a half-second from the previous bout of activity. It's like clock work.

Ultimately I'm trying to figure out whether this is a single hard drive causing all of this or a failing secondary IDE controller.

My hardware config is as such:

Primary IDE controller: 60GB ATA100, Master
cd-rom, Slave
Secondary IDE controller: 100GB ATA100, Master
100GB ATA100, Slave
Motherboard bios is the most current version available

I'm not using any form of RAID. This is the second build of all this stuff and having software raid on the first build really confused the system, and 'yep it did this on the first build too.

Thanks in advance to anyone who read this horribly long post, and even more thanks to anyone willing to help.

Sincerely,

Rick

It sounds like HD failure to me BUT thats just an opinion based on the
"ticking" (Integrated Drive Electronics means the drive is commanding
the head movement not the motherboard IDE chip) )

Rick wrote:

> Howdy All,
>
> I have a 2K box with 3 IDE drives and a cd-rom drive. The problem I've been having is: If the computer has been left running awhile (anywhere from 2 hours to 2 days) what appears to happen is physical disk 1, not 0, will only work intermittently. The 2K OS is installed on disk 0, while 2K3 evaluation, Red Hat 9, and some other software is installed on disk 1. I can usually predict when the drive is going to start acting up because I can hear a faint, slow, click....clack coming from inside the case. The sound itself is sporadic, and happens anywhere from once every 15 seconds to 15 minutes. It almost sounds like a hard drive head bouncing back-and-forth, not sure though. When I'm booted into 2K, 'IF' the drive starts acting up, it usually stalls 2K for a couple of seconds and then continues. If I'm booted into Linux or 2K3, it will eventually crash either of them.
>
> The last thing that makes this weird: Sometimes when the computer boots, the bios doesn't recognize the two hard drives that are on the second IDE controller, disks 1 and 2, but most of the time it does. Disk 1 is the master on the second controller.
>
> The System Monitor shows when the %Disk Time counter is used for all the physical and logical disks, and the 2K system is left idle, physical disk 1 continously shows the same amount of activity about every 5 seconds. And when I say 'about' the activity is always within a half-second from the previous bout of activity. It's like clock work.
>
> Ultimately I'm trying to figure out whether this is a single hard drive causing all of this or a failing secondary IDE controller.
>
> My hardware config is as such:
>
> Primary IDE controller: 60GB ATA100, Master
> cd-rom, Slave
> Secondary IDE controller: 100GB ATA100, Master
> 100GB ATA100, Slave
> Motherboard bios is the most current version available
>
> I'm not using any form of RAID. This is the second build of all this stuff and having software raid on the first build really confused the system, and 'yep it did this on the first build too.
>
> Thanks in advance to anyone who read this horribly long post, and even more thanks to anyone willing to help.
>
> Sincerely,
>
> Rick
>
>
>
>
>

Well then, I'll pull the drive and see what I have to fix/reinstall.

Thanks again for your time.

Rick