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Did I fry my hard drive?


Steve Scrimpshire
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Update:

I burned a Knoppix disk and I can go in and do fsck on /dev/hda5, /dev/hda6, and /dev/hda7 (the partitions I had setup to try to install 9.1...reiserfs). It says the partitions are fine. So, I tried to do:

 

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda5

 

and the hard-drive light comes on for about a minute and then I get the 3 beeps. I lose my cursor for about half a minute, I see the CD Rom light come on for a sec and I get my cursor back and can do things still in Knoppix, the hard-drive light still on. Even though I still see the eth0 adapter for my cable modem in ifconfig, I can no longer browse the web, I let dd keep running and about 2 minutes later I get the 3 beeps again and lose the cursor and get it back. I wish there was some kind of error that printed up on the screen that says:

Hey, I'm the dd script. Did you just hear those 3 beeps? That was because there was a bad spot on the hard drive and what I attempted to write there went into the ethereal plane, but I'm still gonna keep going, cuz there's still stuff to write. If this woulda been a serious error, I would've exited with some kinda translatable error code or segfaulted.

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I still don't think this is a harddrive problem (and that test supports this). Everything I find through google is comming up that it is a memory problem. Sarissi makes a good point that harddrives usually make a really ugly sound when they go.

 

I guess my next step would be to reinstall your ram and other cards plugged into the mobo and see if that helps any. Might pay to contact Asus to decode that 3 beeps.

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Boy, Do I Feel Stupid!

 

:oops::oops::oops::oops::oops::oops::oops:

 

I decided to download and try Redhat 9.0 after all this. The first part of the Redhat install, it asks you if you want to check the CD, so I did. I stood up to stretch my legs while it was doing this test. About a minute into the test, I hear those ominous beeps and look down to see if my HD was being accessed. It was, intermittently, but the thing that caught my eye that I never noticed before, was that my power light was blinking. Hmmmm, I thought, that usually means the system has gone into standby/suspend. So, I stopped the install process and rebooted and went into the BIOS. Sure enough, under the Power Tab, Power Saving was set to Maximum Savings, so I disabled it. Guess what? I rebooted and installed 9.2rc2 without a hitch and I am typing to you from a brand-spanking new (bare) install of 9.2 RC2. So, now to get all my software back on here that I like and get things configured back the way I want them. The good in all of this is that I now have a Knoppix disc and three Redhat disks. (I never bothered to do any CD burning since I got this DVD Burner.)

 

Thanks, everyone! Carry on.

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Glad to here your up and running. I would of never thought it was a power saver option. No need to feel stupid.

 

I really don't get how this hung up the system... especially if it was busy working on an install ??? But it works now and thats a good thing. :D

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