Fwd: Boot failure

[Michael Powell]

Tim Judd wrote:

> On 8/7/09, Roland Smith <rsmith at xs4all.nl> wrote:
> 
>> Looks like your hardware is dying/dead.
> 
> 
> 
> Sadly, I agree.
> 
> 
> Reset BIOS CMOS data (hardware jumper on motherboard)
> Enter RAID controller BIOS, (re)set your "boot drive"
> 
> But it looks like a fundamental BIOS control issue is malfunctioning.
> 
> Do you have a PCI Diagnostics card?  One like the following?
> 
> http://www.uxd.com/phdpci.shtml
> 
> (I'm not saying that exact model, but rather a device that is able to
> see BIOS codes through the PCI bus that can tell very technical detail
> to tech support at the motherboard's vendor (you said Intel, right?).)
> 
> Hardware rarely up and dies.  Have you tried swapping RAM chips out,
> or re-ordering them to see if it might be a RAM problem?
> 
> 
> Maybe we're not passing POST, or that we're passing POST but the
> bootable device list is not finding bootable medium.
> 
> 
> These kind of issues intrigue me, because it is out of the norm, and
> why did it happen.

Sometimes I've seen when a hard drive gets old and the head movement 
mechanism is worn the drive can have problems properly locating the head 
over track 0. I've also noted that sometimes even when it can find track 0 
it couldn't read the mbr. If this happens because of a bad spot has 
developed in the magnetic media there's nothing at this point that can be 
done. If it's just worn head slop sometimes you can write out a fresh mbr 
and use it for a while longer, but the problem will return worse later.

Using smartmontools and smartctl test/diags to get a test dump from the 
drive can be useful at times to decide if replacement is warranted.  

 
> I'd get to the point of swapping hardware one at a time until it
> fixes, or until you exhaust your options.  Have any kind of support
> contract with the OEM?
> 
> --Tim