[TriLUG] hardware problems -- install won't boot

Aaron S. Joyner aaron at joyner.ws
Tue Mar 30 19:04:37 EST 2004


You can certainly isolate the problem further, with only a modicum of 
effort.  Depending on the manufacturer of the drive, head over to their 
website, and look for a drive diagnostic utility.  You can find them for 
Seagate, Western Digital, IBM, Maxtor, etc, etc - virtually any drive.  
If you have difficulty in finding a particular one just ask on the list 
and I"ll be glad to provide a link.  At Intrex we have several guys who 
maintain various different compilation CDs of useful utilities, so we 
have them on hand when they are needed.

Just a gut instinct, I don't think it's the drive.  From the information 
you've provided my money would be on the motherboard.  Try disconnecting 
all of the drives from the system and running memtest from the cdrom (or 
floppy if you have one handy yet).  If it fails w/o the drives attached, 
well you can be pretty sure it's not the drives themselves.  :)  I'd 
then yank all the cards out and repeat the process.  At that point you 
should be down to mb, processor, ram (not likely if memtest is actually 
locking up), floppy drive, or floppy cable.  Of those options, 9 times 
out of 10 it's the mb.  If, on the other hand, it doesn't fail when you 
disconnect the drives, your back to the drive diag disks on the suspect 
drive. If the drive diag locks up (unlikely), it's even more likely that 
it's the MB.  Then, as a last ditch effort try scanning the drive in a 
different computer.

Best of luck,
Aaron S. Joyner


Ryan Wheaton wrote:

> hey y'all.
>
> i'm having a hardware failure somewhere and i can't seem to pinpoint 
> it.  I *think* it's a problem with one of the hard drives, but not 
> quite sure.
>
> there are 3 identical drives in it on an IDE RAID controller.  
> Whenever I have all three drives active in the logical drive (RAID 0), 
> then the install will complete, but when it comes time to boot, I get 
> a kernel panic:
>
> crcerror<6> freeing initrd memory:
> VFS: cannot open root device "LABEL=/" or 00:00
> Please append a correct "root=" boot option
> Kernel panic: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on 00:00
>
> If i do the install with a certain drive (channel 3) not included in 
> the logical drive, then it boots up fine.  This makes me think that 
> the drive is bad...
> I booted to the rescue disk, and ran fsck on it, and it just kept 
> looping through hundreds of inode misconfigurations, but never said 
> anything about bad blocks.
>
> I suspected that possibly the memory was bad as well, so I downloaded 
> the ISO version of Memtest86+ and ran those tests.  Memtest stopped 
> responding in the exact same spot each time I ran it.  I tried running 
> it on each stick of memory individually, but got the same results.  I 
> think this might have something to do with the fact that memtest was 
> on a CD, and I was unable to set the ECC option (there is ECC ram in it).
>
> So, I plan on calling Dell and warranting the drive, but wanted to 
> make sure there isn't anything I haven't tried yet to pinpoint the 
> problem...  I think that the fact that an install works without the 
> drive, but not with the drive tells me a lot... But I might put 
> memtest on a floppy just to be sure...
>
> thanks for listening ;-)
>
> -rtw
>




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