My apologies to Robbie Burns (if he's who I'm paraphrasing).
I just re-learned a really simple thing, I THINK. I'm not sure, because I've been trying to properly diagnose a potentially defective harddrive (HD) or HD controller in an NAS (boot floppy, FTP and HTTP) box and I'm only at day 2-3 of the process.
The last two times I lost power (i.e. improper shutdown) to the NAS box, the NAS initialization sequence would basically just "hang" at the "Detected Disk-1" stage. I gave it 4-6hours to proceed, but saw no harddrive activity during this period.
The first time, I was able to get this 120GB drive and its data back using a bootable cdrom (as described in an earlier post on this thread) and e2fsck. I THOUGHT that maybe I hadn't allowed enough time for NAS to complet te lost block test -- NAS never outputs this to screen, to it's hard to tell what's going on.
The second time, however, I spent many many manhours with mkfs and e2fsck to no avail and ended up reformatting the drive and doing a bad block check (see man mkfs and e2fsck respectively).
Subsequent to that, the BIOS would just hang when it tried to auto-detect the HD (I just had the BIOS set to AUTO since I installed this NAS box) during the boot sequence.
POSSIBLE CORRECTION ?
- well, I'm not sure I have any faulty hardware at all: HD or HD controller !
- replaced the CMOS battery (it's about 8yrs old) for good measure based on one of the Troubleshooting Guides at the Maxtor site.
- based on Maxtor's site, I also tried disconnecting my 120GB HD (IDE cable and power), rebooting and setting the Primary Master (the 120GB's position) drive to None, save settings, shutdown, reconnnect 120GB and reboot and do not re-enter BIOS setup.
- the above is the part I relearned - although this same box had booted with this same drive before about 10 times, fundamentally its BIOS is so old it maybe doesn't know what to make of a 120GB IDE HD.
Why it hadn't consistently failed at this BIOS auto-detect HD stage I don't know, but I've seen erratic behaviour in PCs before.
- since I've made this change in the BIOS even if I literally pull the plug on this running NAS box for 0.5 - 7hours, when I plug it back in and reboot it is available for use within about 15 mins.
- also, when I remotely look at files or telnet on the NAS box it happens as fast as a local operation. There use to be a 1-2 sec. delay before you'd get a reaction. This makes me wonder if I wasn't keeping things busy by having the BIOS set improperly in the first place, and NAS and the hardware were sortof working in spite of this.
Rick D.
Brockville, Canada