Odd hard-drive behaviour

Hey,

I recently installed an old 256 MB hard-drive from an old 386 I had
lying about into a late '99 model 500 MHz Celeron box. It works almost
perfectly, except for the following little problem...

Every so often, when the machine is booted, Linux (my OS of choice -
no flames please; you use what you like) takes an extrememly long time
to carry out a partition check on the drive (it does this every time
you boot.) Before I started mutting around with the OS, I checked out
the BIOS... it hung whilst trying to auto-detect settings for the
drive. I figured there must be a hardware fault with the drive -
seeing as it was so old I couldn't expect much more.

Other times when I boot the machine, Linux checks the drive and goes
on as per normal, only pausing momentarily - as if there was nothing
wrong with it.

I then began to think "what the hell" - just try and use the drive and
see what happens. So I conducted a high level format (ext2 filesystem)
and then block checked it - to my surprise the tests returned no
failures... the drive was apparently perfect. After the format and
block check, I mounted the drive into the filesystem and copied over
some files.

Oh yes... mounting. On some occasions the drive mounts perfectly - no
pause whatsoever. On others, the shell freezes momentarily for
approximately 1 minute. (I have no idea what it is doing during this
time.)

Now, the files are still there - and are still intact. What I don't
like about this is that I have to keep rebooting the machine until the
hard-drive is properly picked up and is able to be mounted without a
pause... Otherwise when there is a pause in mounting, files take a
painfully long time to transfer.(It can take far over 5 minutes to
transfer over a small JPEG.)

By the way, I am running 2.4.20 and as you can most likely tell, am a
recent Linux-convert - my 'nix skills are very limited, although I
have been using computers for longer than I care to remember. (Guess I
should've started with the tux a little earlier, eh)

Any help would be greatly appreciated, I also understand I haven't
included much of my system's specifications. I'll post specs up as
required.

Thankyou

I'd say intermittant faults like this tend to happen with old hard
drives. I wouldn't trust it much if I were you - it could fail any
time!!

- Tom

(goonalicious) wrote in message news:< om>...
> Hey,
>
> I recently installed an old 256 MB hard-drive from an old 386 I had
> lying about into a late '99 model 500 MHz Celeron box. It works almost
> perfectly, except for the following little problem...
>
> Every so often, when the machine is booted, Linux (my OS of choice -
> no flames please; you use what you like) takes an extrememly long time
> to carry out a partition check on the drive (it does this every time
> you boot.) Before I started mutting around with the OS, I checked out
> the BIOS... it hung whilst trying to auto-detect settings for the
> drive. I figured there must be a hardware fault with the drive -
> seeing as it was so old I couldn't expect much more.
>
> Other times when I boot the machine, Linux checks the drive and goes
> on as per normal, only pausing momentarily - as if there was nothing
> wrong with it.
>
> I then began to think "what the hell" - just try and use the drive and
> see what happens. So I conducted a high level format (ext2 filesystem)
> and then block checked it - to my surprise the tests returned no
> failures... the drive was apparently perfect. After the format and
> block check, I mounted the drive into the filesystem and copied over
> some files.
>
> Oh yes... mounting. On some occasions the drive mounts perfectly - no
> pause whatsoever. On others, the shell freezes momentarily for
> approximately 1 minute. (I have no idea what it is doing during this
> time.)
>
> Now, the files are still there - and are still intact. What I don't
> like about this is that I have to keep rebooting the machine until the
> hard-drive is properly picked up and is able to be mounted without a
> pause... Otherwise when there is a pause in mounting, files take a
> painfully long time to transfer.(It can take far over 5 minutes to
> transfer over a small JPEG.)
>
> By the way, I am running 2.4.20 and as you can most likely tell, am a
> recent Linux-convert - my 'nix skills are very limited, although I
> have been using computers for longer than I care to remember. (Guess I
> should've started with the tux a little earlier, eh)
>
> Any help would be greatly appreciated, I also understand I haven't
> included much of my system's specifications. I'll post specs up as
> required.
>
> Thankyou

(Tom) wrote in message news:<. com>...
> I'd say intermittant faults like this tend to happen with old hard
> drives. I wouldn't trust it much if I were you - it could fail any
> time!!
>
> - Tom
>

Yes, age would definitely have something to do with it - I just
thought it was strange for it to begin working every second boot.
(Kinda like a car starting on a cold morning.) The hard-drive actually
doesn't need to be in there... it was more a learning experience
(Linux, multiple hard disks and such.)

Anyway, thankyou for your reply.