[dr_worm]

I have the craziest problem, which I at first thought was a problem with heat, but am now starting to think otherwise. Be forewarned, I use Linux! Currently I am running Debian Etch. Ok, here goes...

My hard drive will randomly (or so it seems) spin down for anywhere from one second to dead-as-a-doornail forever, and then spin back up (if I'm lucky). Upon closer observation of the drive's behavior, I have noticed that the drive does its crazy shutdown act only at certain, (usually) noticable times, i.e. when I click on a menu, or minimize a window, or go back a page in my browser, or when a game is loading the next level, etc. You get the idea: I'm starting to notice that it may be some sort of...event...triggering the drive to spin down and then back up, or any random event if the drive is feeling finnicky, for that matter. Sometimes I freeze up, sometimes I keep on truckin', sometimes I have a few seconds or minutes of delay and I can work again, but in any case, it's annoying. This has happened on several occasions during boot as well, with the same effects, maybe it'll continue booting, maybe it won't. If I'm running a window manager and it freezes, I can force-kill it, but when I kick back out to the terminal, all I have is an error message: "hda: lost interrupt". Same thing on all virtual terminals. I have had some data corruption already, and I'm starting to get a little worried. End description.

So. The drive is old(ish), maybe 3 years. I have another drive that's even older that has had the same problem in the past, and I've been afraid to use it until I can figure out how to salvage the data. LOTS of important data, to me in any case. Any help, of any kind, even a little consolation if that's all you got, would be much appreciated.

Thanks!

[William_Wilson]

I've never heard of such an issue, and to have it happen to more than 1 drive, it sounds like there is something wrong with either your hardware, shorting on specific actions or memory locations in RAM. OR your OS is sending the wrong signals after some use. I would suggest trying a new drive and see if it has the same issue. If it does, then it is not the drive. If not, you could use the old drive as a storage drive and keep your OS far from it.

[dr_worm]

Now that you bring up the RAM, the RAM that came with the mobo was pretty crappy. The mobo itself is pretty crappy, actually. It's not really all that bad though. And the power supply could be a little better. And I do tweak the OS a lot. Heh. Was I asking for this? Maybe...

[William_Wilson]

hmm, it's questionable.... does it run fine for a while, then eventually start doing this? that would be a good sign that yes, "you were asking for it"

[dr_worm]

It seems completely random, aside from the triggering events I described. I've gone for quite a while without a hitch, but eventually it'll come crashing down.

[Antiokus]

That's a really strange thing. Ive never heard of a harddrive doing that. I mean I know spinning up but that usually means that there are a bunch of dead sectors or there is something wrong with it. Usually they wont boot if there is something like that wrong though. Hmm... you might have been asking for it if its only when you do certain stuff, haha. You may just look into a new harddrive if that is possible. I know there are some 3rd party software that will analyze your drive and see if there is something wrong, although I cant think of the names of any at the moment. Ill look around and see if I can find them again.