[mythtv-users] Recording drive disappeared...fine on reboot

[Ryan Patterson]

On Tue, Aug 27, 2013 at 4:24 PM, Ian Evans <dheianevans at gmail.com> wrote:
> . . .
> "the disk drive for /storage1 is not ready or present"
> . . .
> What could have caused the drive to just disappear overnight, but then
> reappear with a hard shutdown?

I once encountered a system that behaved as you describe.  A non-boot
drive would disappear after the system had been running for several
hours or days.  The OS did not register an "unplug event" when the
drive disappeared.  It just vanished.  Upon a reboot the drive would
reappear and work fine (for a while).

I tracked the root cause of the failure to the motherboard
south-bridge overheating.  In my case the nylon bolts holding the
heat-sink to the south-bridge had sheared off.  So the heat-sink was
simply resting on top of the south-bridge and not adequately cooling
it.  There was no other anonymous behavior attributed to the
overheating south-bridge.

Also in the case I'm talking about, the boot drive and the non-boot
drive were connected via different interfaces.  One was SATA and the
other was PATA.  I do not remember which drive utilized which
interface though.  But that explains why the over heating south-bridge
didn't cause both drives to disappear.

-Ryan