Strange case of vanishing disk

Kaya Saman kayasaman at gmail.com
Mon Jun 4 17:39:15 UTC 2012


On 06/04/2012 06:26 PM, Wojciech Puchar wrote:
>>
>> I just "offlined" the system and took a look at the BIOS. The hard 
>> disk controller was set to "ATA NATIVE", I attempted changing to AHCI 
>> and the system failed to boot thereafter.
>
> do you have ahci and ada drivers compiled in?
>
>>
>> Booting into my rescue CD of FreeSBIE, with AHCI enabled only showed 
>> "ad4" (the troubled disk) to be registering.
>
> showing up some, but not all disks after rebooting is quite common to 
> the problem i described.
>
> POWERING OFF (by disconnecting electricity, not by power button), 
> waiting a minute, and powering on "fixes" the problem for some time.

Thanks Wojciech for the responses!

It could be the motherboard; it's an Intel Core2Quad machine!


I am looking at alternatives like Portwell:

http://www.portwell.nl/products/WADE-8011.html

http://www.portwell.nl/products/WADE-8012.html

which are Xeon and i7 based system boards respectively and also 
industrial meaning that they are better designed then consumer desktop 
style boards.


It will be interesting to test once my new rackmount chassis comes along 
with a 400Watt PSU where the system will then go and see what happens 
from there......


This system has been up for 3+ years before running 3x disks; one SSD 
and 2x 2TB drives in a ZFS pool.

I only have 4GB RAM in here which may be an issue since I am also using 
round 5x Jails and 2x Apache Tomcat and 2x Postgresql databases inside 
to host separate instances of Xwiki - yep Java eats RAM for breakfast, 
lunch, and dinner :-)
- will soon be migrating this stuff off the box but not for now as need 
some ca$h first ;-)

Will wait for my new chassis then see what happens!


Regards,


Kaya


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