SATA time outs

[Casey Scott]

I did try different cables. Just failed to mention that. The LiveCD is 
a great suggestion. I'll try that this evening, and see how everything
 works. 

I considered the hardware being marginal, but was surprised when a 
brand new disk controller also failed. In any case, I'll try the LiveCD
and see what I've got to work with. 

Thanks,
Casey

----- "Matthew Seaman" <m.seaman at infracaninophile.co.uk> wrote:

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> On 15/06/2010 16:06:36, Casey Scott wrote:
> > I'd appreciate it if someone could lend some assistance with this
> > issue. The machine in question is pretty much unusable atm!
> 
> You've tried swapping out the drives and the disk controllers, but
> have
> you tried swapping out the SATA cables?  I say this, because I
> personally once spent about two weeks trying to debug a weird problem
> that turned out to be due to a broken conductor in some ethernet
> cable.
> Talk about egg-on-face.
> 
> When doing diagnosis by swapping out components, always start with
> the
> cheapest components and work up to the most expensive.
> 
> Now, component failure is certainly a possibility given that you say
> the
> kit is some years old.  That can be a side effect of upgrading to a
> new
> release -- if you're doing a lot of extra compiling and stuff the
> extra
> load can tip marginal hardware over the edge -- but it is a also
> possibility that there is some sort of introduced bug with the new
> system.
> 
> To confirm this, you'll need to boot back into an older version of
> the
> system and show that all your hardware comes back to life.  Rather
> than
> blowing away all your upgrading work, try using a livecd -- you can
> fsck
> and mount 8.0 UFS filesystems from a 7.x livecd no problem, but be
> careful with ZFS, as there may have been some on-disk format changes
> that aren't backwards compatible.  You might want to grab an 8-STABLE
> snapshot .iso as well: if that works, then you can be fairly certain
> the
> problem will be fixed in 8.1-RELEASE  (although there has definitely
> been a zpool version bump between 8.0-RELEASE and 8.1-RELEASE).
> 
> 	Cheers,
> 
> 	Matthew
> 
> - -- 
> Dr Matthew J Seaman MA, D.Phil.                   7 Priory Courtyard
>                                                   Flat 3
> PGP: http://www.infracaninophile.co.uk/pgpkey     Ramsgate
> JID: matthew at infracaninophile.co.uk               Kent, CT11 9PW
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