[TriLUG] Hardware problems: Bad IDE Drive? Motherboard?

[Joshua Gitlin]

Hey Guys,

So, I returned to my server after a day at the beach this weekend to 
find that the server was unresponsive. I couldn't ping it, the apache 
server was down, I couldn't SSH in. So I hooked up a monitor to the 
machine and tried to execute a few commands... all of which produced 
the output "i/o error". And I mean things like 'ls' produced output 
like that. So I checked my syslog... only to find it filled up with 
messages like this:

EXT2-fs error (device ide0(3,1)) ext2_write_inode: unable to read inode 
block inode=3015009 block=6029322

I then noticed that the light on the case indicating whether or not the 
hard drives were being accessed was on steady! Nothing was working so I 
was forced to hard-reboot. Upon doing that, my system refused to boot 
-- it told me that there were no IDE devices found! So, there's 
obviously a problem... but where do I start looking? Is it an IDE 
drive, or a cable, or the motherboard? And why did turning the machine 
off for a few minutes and turning it on solve the problem? Any heal 
would be apprecieated. Thanks guys!

Joshua Gitlin
Webmaster/Network Admin
Tumaz.com
http://josh.tumaz.com/
http://tumaz.com/