john lewis wrote:
> I have been running an old Dell Optiflex GX110 (with original 512 Meg
> of memory) as a backup system for a year or more without any problems,
> for some reason it rebooted itself last week and failed to restart.
>
> OS is Debian Lenny with a 2.6.26 kernel. 80 gig hard drive with three
> partitions / and /home (formatted ext3) plus swap
>
> Eventually I found the the bios had reset the hard disk setting from
> the original 80 gig to 10 Gig so grub wouldn't start.
If BIOS settings are changing randomly on an old PC, I would immediately
suspect that the CMOS battery is flat.
>
> When I corrected the bios setting it then booted ok BUT it runs
> terribly slowly. I know it isn't a very fast system to start with but it
> is currently taking 40+ minutes to get from the grub screen to a logon
> prompt.
Perhaps the hard drive is failing too.
>
> In fact I think it has timed out somewhere along the line and is
> going nowhere in multi-user mode. Am going to reboot and run single
> user mode.
>
> One advantage of it being so slow is that I can read all the screen
> messages that normally flash by and I have just noticed this:
>
> hda: host side 80-wire cable detection failed, limiting max speed to
> UDMA33
Does it have an 80-wire cable? Have you tried reseating the drive cable?
>
> Could that be the problem?
>
> I had earlier tried changing to another hard drive, also with Lenny
> installed, but that made no difference. I tried installing Debian Sarge
> on the second disk and it took 13 hours to get a basic system installed
> to the point where I could logon.
>
> I am currently trying to get memtest86 installed and running to see if
> the memory is faulty, my first attempt didn't get memtest added to the
> grub boot options so am going to manually edit /boot/grub/menu.lst if I
> ever get to a logon prompt, (now 37 minutes since reboot).
>
> Am going to go and have breakfast and maybe it will have done so by the
> time I come back ;-)
>
> Any suggestions as to what else could be at fault would be welcome. I
> no longer have any stock of replacement bits and pieces, apart from
> the second hard drive, as I had a clear out before we moved here so
> cannot swap bits and pieces around.
>
> It may be that this system has is passed its 'usability date' and
> I'll need to get a replacement system but the only option locally is
> to buy a brand new system from PC World which I am very reluctant to
> do. All I need is to be able to clone (rsync) the /home partition on my
> main system to a backup system.
How about just using an external USB hard drive for that?
cheers
Chris
--
Chris Dennis cgdennis@???
Fordingbridge, Hampshire, UK
