SATA woes and Linux 2.6.17

2006 July 19 at 02:43 » Tagged as :

The other day, I wrote about trouble with my SATA hard drive. Since there wasn't a definitive answer anywhere, I thought to upgrade the kernel to see if that would solve the problem. It didn't.

Most often I don't shut down my machine and leave it running overnight. When I woke up in the morning I found that it had crashed. Nothing would respond. On reboot the SATA disk wasn't being detected at all. However juggling the cables and a does of contact cleaner seemed to solve that problem and the system booted up and ran on for another day, before promptly crashing again.

This time I noticed that the disk had become too hot to touch. That's strange, there is plenty of cooling inside the box. There are three fans (not counting the power supply fan) plus a hard disk cooler. The hard disk cooler though isn't attached to the SATA drive, so I decied to reposition the drives so that the SATA drive is directly in front of one of the fans. Let's see how that goes.