In article , root wrote:
I'm sorry, I didn't see the stratus post:

No, quick power cycle gives nothing. The system won't
boot up at all. After a few minutes of OFF, the system
will run a few minutes. The first failure followed
a fresh install. I took a nap and came back after
a couple of hours and the system wouldn't read the
disk. Subsequent failures happened during attempts
to copy several tens of Gb of files from a backup
disk to the fresh install. After a couple of hours
(or more) the copies would result in i/o error and
then the system was dead.

Do you have more details on specifically what sort of
I/O error is being reported? This might help pinpoint
just what's going wrong.

On some systems (e.g. Linux) the kernel logs would prove
helpful... the disk driver will log the actual values of
the disk's status register, as well as status from the
motherboard's disk controller.

This information could help distinguish actual on-the-disk
faults (which from your previous posts seem like they aren't the
issue), from unexpected disk resets (which could indicate power
supply problems), from DMA CRC errors (which would indicate
communication problems over the cable, or faults in the
onboard disk controller), from timeouts and host-initiated
resets (which once again could point to host-side problems).

Another suggestion: make yourself a boot disk with a
copy of MEMTEST86+, boot it up, and let it run overnight. A
lot of weird system misbehavior can be caused by sporadic
DRAM problems.

--
Dave Platt AE6EO
Friends of Jade Warrior home page: http://www.radagast.org/jade-warrior
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