Hardware or software issue?

Fenster

Over the past week or so, my two hard drives have apparently died on me and I'm unsure as to whether this might be a hardware or software issue.

While doing something that will require reading from the hard drive I hear a "clink" from it and my machine gradually dies. A few times I've managed to switch back to the command line where it gives me DMA errors.

I'm running Fedora Linux with Reiser FS. Both hard drives-Samsung slave and Western Digital master went out in the same manner. I thought originally it might've been a power surge, but it if was it didn't affect anything else and would've had to have gone through my surge protector, which I've checked and found to be working okay.

Its not normally I'd post something like this, but I'm a wee bit broke and don't want to shell out for replacment hard drives if I can avoid it. I'd have looked into it before now, but I was on holidays in Paris.

Master HD: Western Digital 7200 RPM
Slave HD: Samsung 7200 RPM

(alas that I don't have models to hand)

Rest of my system spec:

P4 2.8ghz w/ HT, 512kb cache, 533 side bus.

Nvidia 5900xt graphics card.

Asus P4 motherboard.

Its while running something that reads/writes a lot (ie games, World of Warcraft in paticular) that the hard drives die on me.

uberpixie

What psu are you using?

Have you added any new hardware in the last while?

Fenster

Its a Mercury 400w PSU, although its never given me any trouble. I haven't added any new internal hardware in about six months.

ChRoMe

Are the drives in a raid configuration? If not thats poxy luck for both to go at the same time.

Boro

My brother had a similar problem. Every time that he was playing a game that involved lots of loading (pro evo, DoW, etc) the drives would start making clicking/clunking noises and the machine would hang. Funnily enough, he had a WD and Samsung also (both 80gb) in the same master/slave config.

Tracked it down to the PSU eventually (a crappy Qtech 400w). Replaced that the other day and no problems so far. It only happened during games, and with the weak psu (with unstable rails anyway) we surmised that it was the extra power draw (from the gfx card?) that was just destabilising the system. Hope this helps.

tonky

Maybe both drives are not gone. Can you physically seperate them and figure which one is clinking? Could be the master is screwing the IDE bus and bringing down the slave or something. Sods law, these things always happen when your spare cash is tied up. Assume the drives are not that old, looking at your spec.

/Just read Boro's post - makes sense, must move faulty PSU up my checklist/.

Fenster

tonky wrote:

Maybe both drives are not gone. Can you physically seperate them and figure which one is clinking? Could be the master is screwing the IDE bus and bringing down the slave or something. Sods law, these things always happen when your spare cash is tied up. Assume the drives are not that old, looking at your spec.

/Just read Boro's post - makes sense, must move faulty PSU up my checklist/.

Its not a RAID, firstly.

Its *both* drives that are acting like this. I'd normally write the drive off as banjaxed, but for both to go in identical fashion in such a short time?

Both drives are seperate-one the Samsung slave went I unplugged it and used the WD as master-then the WD went about two days later.

tonky

Sorry mate, from your original post:

Master HD: Western Digital 7200 RPM
Slave HD: Samsung 7200 RPM

I assumed you had both installed as Master and Slave on the ide cable.

Fenster

Ahh.

PSU it is, I guess...

Fenster

It was the PSU in the end, well spotted.

I put in a new one earlier today and its been working grand since.