[vox-tech] Puzzling Hard Drive Behavior

[Ted Deppner]

On Sat, Jan 11, 2003 at 05:56:01PM -0800, Richard S. Crawford wrote:
> GRUB appears normally when I turn on the computer, and I select Linux. 
> However, Linux is unable to mount the root filesystem as a r/w system,
> and sets it as read-only.  The whole system fails when it tries to
> initiate the system logger.

boot using "linux emergency"

Run the following command on each drive:

dd if=/dev/hdX bs=1024k count=500 | md5sum      # md5 hash of first 500mb
#That command is designed to isolate data transfer problems... if your
#cables are too long or bad, you'll get different data each time.  

Run that several times, compare the output of md5sum.  The md5 hash should
be exactly the same each run, for each individual drive.

The last time I had a drive misbehave on mounts, it was a bad drive cable.

-- 
Ted Deppner
http://www.psyber.com/~ted/