On 7/23/07, <b class="gmail_sendername">Brian Wood</b> <<a href="mailto:beww@beww.org">beww@beww.org</a>> wrote:<div><span class="gmail_quote"></span><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
My guess would be that when you recently were working on the machine<br>one of the IDE cables loosened up at a connector (the ribbon cable to<br>the connector, not the connector pair itself). This can happen easily,<br>especially with not-top-of-the-line cables.
<br><br>Even with a bad HDD you should have been able to boot the Live CD,<br>unless the drive failure actually dragged one or more lines down, or<br>even possibly dragging the 12 or 5 volt PS down. But the drive couldn't
<br>have been too badly off electronically, if the BIOS could recognize it,<br>leaving mechanical problems of course.<br><br>In any case, I'll bet you have a bad cable (or connector), possibly a<br>bad drive, and just possibly both.
<br><br>BEWW</blockquote><div><br><br>Thanks Brian. Is it really possible that the ribbon/connector/ide bus has some issue which is allowing the one hard drive to boot, but none of the others I've tried. In all of my test cases i was using the same ribbon and the same connector. I can swap out the ribbon and see if that makes a difference... but is there anything else I can actually do to test this theory?
<br><br>I've been thinking about starting to play with setting up a diskless FE... maybe now is the time :).<br></div><br></div><br>