On Monday 31 October 2005 16:15, Silviu Marin-Caea wrote:
Investigating the hard-disk is most probably a waste of time. Some bad blocks on the disk don't manifest with spontaneous resets. It does in Windows 2000 (dunno about the others). I've seen that a few times. Actually it throws up a BSOD and then resets, but the BSOD flashes by so quickly on this box, you don't really see it if you're not paying attention.
However, as most of you suggested, the discs were not at fault. I downloaded the Seatools CD and ran all the diagnostics, checks out fine. The problem seems to be an update to the onboard raid controller (this is an Intel Server board, but as usual with IDE/SATA, they have cheap-arse components on it) via Windows Update that change the lowlevel format of the raid set. Bizarre. I figured this out when I gave up and wanted to reload - the setup told me the discs were blank. /rant on Speaking of Intel, I'm not impressed with the boards they've produced lately. The last two years worth of server boards I've dealt with all had at least one issue that I don't expect from magnificently expensive server hardware. Cheap onboard components like Promise and Sil_Image raid controllers (they have their own hardware raid processors, why don't they use that?), buggy ACPI (So bad I have to disable it to get SUSE to boot at all, and this is not a new board), poor performance considering what I can get for half the price. I have one server at a client, the bios of which doesn't have the "Power on after power failure" option. It has "Soft Off" and "Last state." The box runs MS SQL, so there's no way I can just let it run out of power, I have to have the UPS software shut it down. Which means "Last state" is always "Off" i.e. the box doesn't power on when the power comes back on. No BIOS update to fix that either. I'm getting better results from Gigabyte desktop boards that sometimes cost, CPU included, less than half of what the server board they replace cost. /rant off
But if you really feel you need to do it, boot the "Rescue System" and use the badblocks command. 99.99999% it will tell you the hard-disk is just fine and peachy. On which CD is this - windows or SUSE?
Thanks for all the replies Hans