On Fri, 28 May 2010 14:47:25 -0700 (PDT), mike
wrote:

brought home from the scrapyard three different E-machine computers,
all of which had a blown-up power supply made by Bestec

e-Machines are not the best quality. The power supplies and fans are
the first to go. CDROM and floppy are next. After that, the
motherboard.

I was sorting out what I could drop off at the recyclers, scrapyard
and landfill, when I once again hooked up a Western Digital 40 Gb hard
drive,

Model number? Series?
The Protege series were tolerable. Protoge would last about 4 years
and blow up. The Caviar series would last perhaps 2 years and blow
up. About 1/3 of the pile is WD, mostly 40GB but some 80 and 120GB.
http://802.11junk.com/jeffl/pics/drivel/disk-drives.jpg
(New drives, boxed drives, and SCSI arrays are buried elsewhere).

Then, this morning in the middle of my readings the system went brain-
dead on me.

What does that mean? Did the drive fail, or was there some other
problem? It's highly likely that the drive failed.

- booted into Ubuntu 8.04 fine,

Ummmm.... Ubuntu 10.04 is the current version.

The Western Digital diagnostics pronounce it to be error-
free.

The WD diagnostics will pronounce a failing drive to be good. What
did you expect? Fire up SmartMonTools in Ubuntu and extract the
S.M.A.R.T. statistics. You'll find one of three possible results,
depending on WD drive model:
1. Lots of errors and pronouncement of imminent failure. This is
what you get with the later drives. I don't think any of the 40GB
drives are late enough to produce an honest result.
2. Absolutely perfect drive with no errors. This is what I usually
see. WD lies on its S.M.A.R.T. stats.
3. Can't obtain S.M.A.R.T. That's what I see when someone has
juggled controller cards. I also see that when there's a controller
failure.


--
# Jeff Liebermann 150 Felker St #D Santa Cruz CA 95060
# 831-336-2558
# http://802.11junk.com
# http://www.LearnByDestroying.com AE6KS