On Sat, 2007-02-17 at 22:53 -0600, Jonathan Berry wrote: > On 2/16/07, Dan Hensley <dan@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > [snip] > > All I know is that I now doubt that my hard drive is the problem. It's > > working fine now. GRUB boots. About the only thing I can think of that > > I did was turn on SATA channel 2 in the BIOS (was off because I only > > have 1 SATA drive), and changed drive boot order in the BIOS so the SATA > > drive is first in the list. I have an IDE drive on as well that I use > > for nightly rsync backups, but it's not bootable as far as I know. > > Umm... this could be a problem. Changing the drive order in the BIOS > can confuse GRUB. GRUB is very low-level and uses the BIOS to access > disks. If you change the drive order, GRUB could then be pointing at > the wrong drive, and thus will not work. So far it's been fine. I just make sure my desired boot disk is first in the list. Whatever I did, my system is running fine now. > > > Your drive was questionable, as you found out. You may have a bad RAM > > > stick (pop your sticks out, reseat them and run memtest86) or your power > > > supply may be getting weak (slap on a DMM and check it). You'd be > > > amazed at how weird a machine can get if the power supply is dying. > > > > My power supply died several months ago, so I replaced it with a new > > Antec one. So I doubt that's it. I haven't run memtest86 recently. > > A power supplying dying can wreak havoc on a system. I would test all > of your components that were attached to that PSU as best you can. It > could have damaged anything it was attached to when it failed. It didn't die while the system was running, so it probably didn't too too much to the system. One morning I took the computer out to the garage to blow out the dust, and when I brought it back in it wouldn't turn on. Today I tested the hard drive and memory, and both are fine. So perhaps the PSU made my BIOS flakey. I don't know. Dan > > Jonathan > >
