On 13-Feb-06 Wayne Stallwood wrote:
On Mon, 2006-02-13 at 22:00 +0000, Ted.Harding@nessie.mcc.ac.uk wrote:
So tabbed over to IDE setup to see what whas there, or not. Apparently the HDD and its parameters showed up OK. So quit Setup without saving and let it re-boot. Success: clean boot off HDD. Repeatable -- shut down, switch off, disconnect from mains, re-connect, switch on -> clean re-boot as if nothing had ever happened.
I've had this before on a failing hard drive...randomly fails to be seen by the Bios....very very common on a limited range of Fujitsu units..can end one day in total failure so I'd encourage her to backup soon (if she doesn't already)
It can also be caused by drive stiction, but that more often occurs after the machine has been left off for a longer time.
Thanks for this info, Wayne. New to me, but pleased that it's a recognisable phenomenon. And for the advice.
I'm hoping it may be "stiction", rather than a more fundamental terminal disease, but will consider all possibilities!
What, by the way, in "stiction", sticks? Is it the mechanism which traverses the heads over the disk surfaces? (That would explain the failure to find the "missing operating system". Or could it be that the disks themselves don't start to spin?
I suppose the simplest cure is a new HDD, install alongside the old one, boot from Linux on a Floppy, and then
dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdd
and drink a cup of coffee.
Thanks, and any further comments will be welcome! Ted.
-------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) Ted.Harding@nessie.mcc.ac.uk Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 14-Feb-06 Time: 07:56:43 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------