Hardware Problem, Best Way to Diagnose

[David Fletcher]

On Friday 01 Apr 2005 23:58, Jess Anderson wrote:
> I'm having ongoing crashes and unrepeatable errors in
> routine scripts. Memory has checked out find repeatedly,
> so is not especially suspect.
>
> My current prime suspect is the hard disk system, either
> the onboard SATA controller (VIA), the disk drive itself
> (Maxtor) or the OS (FC3).
>
> I can show that data on the disk has changed since it was
> written, that is, originally it was correct but now it
> is wrong -- a date field that was "1998" is now "19)8".
>
> Could I be looking at a bad block, perhaps? If I understand
> the man page for e2fsck, I can do a nondestructive mapping
> out of bad blocks by doing
>
>   e2fsck -c -c /dev/sda<n>
>
> for <n> corresponding to my non-swap, non-/boot partitions
> (booting from the rescue disk, of course).
>
> Is that right? I'm open to other suggestions as to how to
> track this down as definitively as possible, and if the drive
> checks out what to try next.
>
> (Because I've never had *any* hardware problems before, i.e.,
>  since 1986, I'm kind of a newbie about such stuff.)
>
> Any and all help appreciated.
>
> --
> [] I realized that with hard work, the world was your oyster.
> [] You could do anything you wanted to do. I learned that at
> [] a young age.
> [] -- Chris Evert Lloyd, 1954-
> --
> *  Copyright 2005 Jess Anderson
> *  www.jessanderson.org  *  anderson at wisc.edu
> *  Window Maker Themes: www.jessanderson.org/wmthemes

Last time I kept getting unexplained errors and crashes, I eventually found a 
screw dropped behind the motherboard!

Advice I've been given, is to check your power supply. I'm told that the 
voltage provided by cheap power supplies can be a bit unstable, which of 
course causes problems. So instead of spending £15 on a power supply I spent 
£50, and bought a UPS as well.

Dave