On Thu, Dec 20, 2007 at 04:12:51PM -0800, Brion Vibber wrote:
... and the main dump server appears to have nicely crashed again. Symptoms look like a disk or filesystem problem (anything involving disk access hangs or dies, but the machine stays on the net and accepts connections which never go anywhere). Having it rebooted; we may have to replace it.
For what it's worth, that sounds like the same set of symptoms I saw last year on a drive on my sister's MythTV box. One drive, if you accessed anywhere in a specific range of sectors, would knock the IDE controller offline: you could no longer access *anything on any drive*, until you rebooted, at which point you were golden, until you accessed those sectors again.
Worked on 2 different motherboards, with 2 different chipsets, under Linux, Windows, and Spinrite's FreeDOS. Clearly it was hardware, but I've never seen it happen ever any other time in 20 years.
Cheers, -- jra