On 08/10/2015 12:27 AM, David C. Rankin wrote:
So this has me scratching my head. Unless I had simultaneous failure of both drives, it appears when anything is connected to the primary controller, boot hangs at "Detecting Hard Drives". (I have not tried discs alone on the secondary controller channel alone) ESATA is not bootable.
Boot from USB?
The DVD is detected just fine and I've pulled all cards and memory and reseated just in case there was a stray bit of resistance somewhere.
Boot from (Live) DVD?
Has anyone experienced anything similar? If so, any pointers? I did have 1 SATA cable go bad a year or so ago, but given my diagnostics, I can't see 2 cables going bad at once.
You need to establish basic motherboard integrity, Cpu integrity. There are many self-test, memory test and so on you can use. My dell has short-form and long form test BIOS settings. Check you BIOS for options. It may give you details. You say "native controller" implying that it is integrated to the motherboard. Perhaps the issue isn't the disk controller has died but the motherboard has aged out. Is it from the Years of The Bad Capacitors? These fully integrated motherboards represent a particular approach to mass production economics. Sometimes its a bit of a lowest common denominator set of decisions. Often you can disable the on-board and make use of a plugin board. But crank the numbers. On the one hand ... I once had a mobo with a pretty useless SiS video. I got a decent ATI Radeon from a friend for $20. That was worth it for a home "hobby" system. On the other hand ... A production server goes down and its costing $mucho$ per hour, so replacing the mobo, heck replacing the whose 1U, is the cheapest approach. Its all fibrechanneled RAID data anyway so its a Line Replaceable Unit. The replacements are all preconfigured. In fact its not worth even diagnosing what was wrong with the pulled unit. Its not that the cost of the day or so work by a $30/hr tech isn't worth it, but you do have to consider (a) the bureaucratic/managerial overhead makes that closer to $250/hr and(b) can't he be doing something productive instead of 'firefighting'. I learnt this LRU technique (discard & replace rather than stop & repair) in the military. You can, I'm sure, find videos on Youtube showing fast turn around service of aircraft on carriers using this technique. When we were doing it we didn't even test the LRUs we just replaced them anyway. beleive me, that was the best economics. A certified box was better than one that had been stressed on a previous mission and left in place. The sub-text here is "Disaster Planning". Having those LRU 1U boxes preconfigured. One site I served at approached this in what I thought was an idiotic manner. They had a spare 'Net line, spare router, spare switch sitting next to the 'live' one ready to cut over. 100% redundancy, inactive. The thing is though, no-one had done any analysis as to load, bandwidth; what would it be like to run both. If one failed the other was there without any switchover time. You could take one down for maintenance. You you could argue both ways, but no-one ever had, no-one had ever looked at the economics. So you want to find out what went wrong, David. But what is your time worth? What is the down-time worth? What is the cost of a new motherboard? What is the cost of just having a spare driver board, video board to hand? I'm (semi-retired) and my role isn't (most of the time) on the bleeding edge. But my often referred to 'Closet of Anxieties' very often serves as a "Keep Things Working" resource. A number of people are running Linux on machines that could only run XP, but since they only need email/browser and are happy with Firefox/Thunderbird they never see the Linux layer. Perhaps one day they will get a W/10 machine and complain bitterly about the menus and all the things Microsoft changes between releases, while their old (Linux) system stayed consistent. The point is they can keep working. They thank me for this. Eventually some have asked about Linux. "Oh, it look pretty much like the Word I'm used to, not the thing Microsoft are doing now". That, too, is "economics". The "sameness" means they don't have to go off on re-training courses. My thoughts, David, run to economics. The cost of DR planning, the cost of preparedness vs other costs. I'm sure someone is going to say that "economics" and "DR planning" is OT on a technical forum like this. But if it comes down to "how can I get my system running", you do need to consider if its easier/cheaper/faster to just replace the mobo. -- A: Yes. > Q: Are you sure? >> A: Because it reverses the logical flow of conversation. >>> Q: Why is top posting frowned upon? -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org