[ubuntu-uk] SATA drive problem .....

[Matthew Daubney]

On 18 March 2011 12:20, Barry Drake <bdrake at crosswire.org> wrote:

> Hi there ......
>
> I'm really scratching my head over this one.  My wife's computer has a
> ALiveNF6P-VSTA motherboard.  This has one IDE connector and four SATA
> ports.  It was running Windows 2000 on a SATA drive, so I installed a
> second SATA drive (250 GiB) and put Ubuntu 10.04 on it.  I also
> installed a 160 GiB IDE drive for backups and all was fine.
>
> Last week, the IDE drive gave a SMART report that it was getting flaky
> so I replaced it with a 500 GiB Hitachi SATA drive.  Problems!  Could
> not copy more than 167.9 MB of data (by any means)  After that, the
> partition (ext4) became read only until I rebooted!  I tried
> re-partitioning and re-formatting and the drive appeared to die.  A
> Hitachi boot disk with a diagnostic/repair tool told be that the boot
> sector had an irrecoverable mechanical error.
>
> As a last resort, I popped the drive into my computer, and it
> re-formatted perfectly and showed no SMART errors.  I tried a 160 GiB WD
> drive in my wife's computer.  EXACTLY the same problem occurs.  I've now
> re-formatted it to NTFS and tried booting into the Windows 2000 disk.
> There is no problem copying files to the WD disk from Windows. But the
> problem is identical from Ubuntu.
>
> I've tried swapping the disks into different SATA slots and I've tried
> various things in the BIOS.  The only clue here is that the Mobo manual
> tells me: "LBA/Large Mode - Use this item to select the LBA/Large mode
> for a hard disk > 512 MB under DOS and Windows; for Netware and UNIX
> user, select [Disabled] to disable the LBA/Large mode."
>
> I've tried this on the WD drive and it makes no difference.  I tried it
> on the Ubuntu drive, but it causes Grub failure and brings up the Grub
> rescue prompt.  I could re-install with the LBA/Large mode turned off,
> but it's going to be hard for me to do a backup first ....  I think I'd
> have to re-install an IDE drive to do it.
>
> This entire saga doesn't make any sense at all to me.  Any thoughts?  I
> have no problem at all with either of the above SATA drives in my own
> computer which also has three SATA drives installed - and the LBA/Large
> mode is set to 'auto' on that one.
>
> Kind regards,           Barry.
>
>
I'd check if there's an update for the BIOS, I've seen various
drives/chipset configurations have weird issues over time :)

-Matt Daubney
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-uk/attachments/20110318/dc071b71/attachment.html>