dan in Jersey Posted May 3, 2008 Report Share Posted May 3, 2008 After working perfectly for 5 months, I am having boot problems with GRUB. It took several tries to get my machine to boot this morning, I kept receiving errors during GRUB, errors #16 & #18 to be specific. I also received a different error the first try , I don't remeber exactly what it was, but it read " cylinder exceeds" something. I am condering doing a complete Install, but I don't know if this is a hardware, or software problem. Anyone else experience this? Any suggestions? Any help is sincerely appreciated as always. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
arctic Posted May 3, 2008 Report Share Posted May 3, 2008 How old is your harddrive and how old is your motherboard? This sounds as if a device is nearing its death. But before you start to panic, check if the IDE cable is attached well and do a thorough harddisk check with a diagnostics tool. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
scarecrow Posted May 3, 2008 Report Share Posted May 3, 2008 It sounds like a disk geometry error indeed, which means that either the HD, or the mainboard are starting to misbehave. Should't be OS related. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dan in Jersey Posted May 3, 2008 Author Report Share Posted May 3, 2008 Thanks for the replies, a pending hardware failure is what I was afraid of, and have already backed up everything I care about. I built the system almost 18 months ago, with all new hardware. It took me approx ten tries to get it to boot past GRUB this morning, but since, I have shut it down, and started it back up 4 times without incident. Doesn't want to run cold??....whick makes me think it may in fact be a connection problem. I will pull the box and check the IDE cables. The Connector at the motherboard did work it's way loose several months ago, but then it would take almost a minute to detect the IDE drives during boot, where it normally would flash past that screen. At that time, this was a XP box.It is not stalling at the point where it detects the drives, but stall during GRUB. If I do in fact have looming hardware failure, I would suspect the HDD, do you all agree? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
arctic Posted May 3, 2008 Report Share Posted May 3, 2008 Yupp. The hdd is most probable to fail. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SilverSurfer60 Posted May 3, 2008 Report Share Posted May 3, 2008 I would think cable rather than death at this point. I suffered with the same symptoms a couple of years back and a disconnect and reconnect of the ide cable at the drive end sorted it. No problems since as of yet. Good luck. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
scarecrow Posted May 3, 2008 Report Share Posted May 3, 2008 (edited) I had a similar issue with a hard disk which was randomly vanishing. I did a lot of fscks, all of them absolutely clean. I replaced the SATA cable with another one, still no joy. Finally I plugged the HD power socket to another PSU outlet, and kaboom, no problems since then. So, try yourself another drive connector, as well as another PSU power outlet. It might be that one of them is causing all that trouble. Edited May 3, 2008 by scarecrow Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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