Strange HDD Issue

Post by **Kills On Site** » Fri Dec 01, 2006 1:07 am

At my school there are two Dell GX240s with some strange issues. The problem is that the hard drives are acting extremely strange. I am not sure what the intial problem was, but now when you try and load a hard drive image unto the drive it downloads and looks like it is going to work, yet it does not. The school runs on Novell and SuSe btw. Then when you boot is bypasses the HDD completely. I went into the BIOS and it did not recognize the HDD. I also booted Ultimate Boot CD and did SMART checks and whatnot, all came back fine. The technician said he had done all sorts of reformats and MBR repairs. Anyone got any possible solutions to this?

Post by **+JuggerNaut+** » Fri Dec 01, 2006 1:42 am

latest bios upgrade?

Post by **Kills On Site** » Fri Dec 01, 2006 1:46 am

No clue, I'll look into it.

Post by **+JuggerNaut+** » Fri Dec 01, 2006 3:05 am

some of the GX240/260's had really shitty mobos (apparently up to 12 diff ones were made for that system) and they had all kinds of weird issues, just an fyi.

Post by **Kills On Site** » Mon Dec 04, 2006 9:57 pm

Well I switched the harddrives of the two nonworking Dells with two working Dells, the two working Dells booted fine on the harddrives from the nonworking Dells. The strange thing is one of the nonworking Dells did boot, the other had the same issue. So I started out, two working Dells and two nonworking Dells and ended up three working Dells and one nonworking Dell. I really do hate these computers. Also, will try the BIOS update soon, there is one for the GX240

Post by **Kills On Site** » Mon Jan 08, 2007 6:19 pm

Well The issue persists. I checked Dell's website and no new BIOS updates have been issued since 2002. The issue is continuing to exist even after a new HDD. I believe the motherboard is to fault for this, but I must examine every possibility before the school scraps a computer, two actually.

Post by **FragaGeddon** » Tue Jan 09, 2007 7:10 am

All signs point to yes.

Post by **+JuggerNaut+** » Tue Jan 09, 2007 11:48 am

Kills On Site wrote:Well The issue persists. I checked Dell's website and no new BIOS updates have been issued since 2002. The issue is continuing to exist even after a new HDD. I believe the motherboard is to fault for this, but I must examine every possibility before the school scraps a computer, two actually.

well, i guess good thing you're not getting paid. i would have scrapped them on day one.

Post by **ilumos** » Tue Jan 09, 2007 6:16 pm

I had some problems with a hard drive where it wouldn't boot XP off it giving the error "Erorr loading OS" or something similarly unhelpful. I tried everything, changing drive access mode from "Auto" to "Large" to "LBA" in the BIOS and reformatting, but it still wouldnt boot. As a last resort i zeroed the hard drive, and voila, after 4 hours of zeroing, it worked flawlessly. Worth a try, but as said above it could be squiffy motherboards.

Post by **Kills On Site** » Tue Jan 09, 2007 7:50 pm

The drives have been DBANed, but no luck.

Post by **Tormentius** » Tue Jan 09, 2007 8:14 pm

Then its probably the motherboard.

Post by **YourGrandpa** » Wed Jan 10, 2007 4:49 pm

I've got a similar issue with my file server at home. It's an older PC (P3 800MHz) that I've added (2) PCI, 4 Port SATA cards. Some times one of the SATA drives doesn't show up when you boot the PC. All of the drives are good and the PCI SATA cards are good, but it still refuses to work 100% of the time. After hours of testing and reconfiguring hardware I've written it off as some kind of IRQ assignment issue and just reboot the PC when the BIOS doesn't see that drive. :icon32:

Post by **AmIdYfReAk** » Wed Jan 10, 2007 6:02 pm

Kills On Site wrote:Well The issue persists. I checked Dell's website and no new BIOS updates have been issued since 2002. The issue is continuing to exist even after a new HDD. I believe the motherboard is to fault for this, but I must examine every possibility before the school scraps a computer, two actually.

any by scrap, you mean give to you and use them as bitch box's or fix and sell, right?

Post by **Kills On Site** » Wed Jan 10, 2007 9:34 pm

I do not know what the school does with broken computers. I might get it, it all depends on what the county office's policy. I wouldn't sell them, they don't appear to be fixable without getting a new motherboard and by then prolly a new case. It is just a strange issue and I fear that it might start happening more and more. About 80% of the computers are GX240s.

Post by **+JuggerNaut+** » Wed Jan 10, 2007 11:26 pm

riddla wrote:
+JuggerNaut+ wrote:some of the GX240/260's had really shitty mobos (apparently up to 12 diff ones were made for that system) and they had all kinds of weird issues, just an fyi.
actually, no. it was one motherboard, the intel 965GBF

they suffered from the bad cap issue. KOS, look at the caps on the board - are they swollen or leaking?

i'm sorry, my Dell rep was wrong - not.

but, quite a few WERE fatty caps. had a 270 go tits up the other day and they were ALL bloated.

Post by **Tormentius** » Thu Jan 11, 2007 2:13 am

riddla wrote:lol, your dell rep I'm a Dell Warranty Parts Direct certified technician sparky; I've read the recall in my WPD inbox. ffs.

Just an FYI: Dell has problems with lots more than just one type of motherboard so chances are that Jugg's rep was right and you probably are too.

Post by **+JuggerNaut+** » Thu Jan 11, 2007 2:42 am

parts technician

look, spanks, this is what he told me and i've also heard it from another guy from Getronics.

Post by **Kills On Site** » Thu Jan 11, 2007 11:08 pm

What is a good way to delete and recreate the MBR. I want to see if that has any effect. I heard from a friend that DBAN doesn't delete the MBR, so I would like to try that

the two drives I was able to do a quick fitness test on it, SMART status bad, the other was being DBANed at the time. The one that got the bad status was DBANing at around 3,000 Kb/s, sometimes less and the other drive was going at 43,000 KB/s.