[mythtv-users] new drive, same problem

Stephen Worthington stephen_agent at jsw.gen.nz
Fri Dec 21 00:33:39 UTC 2018


On Thu, 20 Dec 2018 14:17:58 -0500, you wrote:

>Amazon replaced, what I figured was a wonky drive and it drops out
>occasionally just like the one it replaced. I have my OS on SSD in sata1
>three recording drives on sata2,3&4. and ide rom drive and a blueray rom
>drive into a sata port on a PCI card.
>
>With the first drive I copied with gparted, then clonezilla, and this one I
>used rsync.
>
>No matter which sata port, sata cable, or power cable, it's always storage2
>that drops out.
>
>Why does boot-repair install grub on all disks? Do I need it beyond the SSD
>with my OS?
>
>Even after I went into the BIOS and highlighted the Kingston SSD as the
>first boot disk, boot-repair noted an error suggesting I make sure that the
>Kingston was the first boot disk?
>
>Where else can I look? What more info can I provide? This should be simple,
>right?
>
>TIA  Daryl

So I presume that at this point, you have tried swapping the cables so
that the bad drive is on cables that are known to work with one of the
good drives.  Have you then tried using those same cables on a good
drive, and plugging them into different SATA ports to ensure you do
not have a bad SATA port?  Or more than one bad SATA port, as they are
usually paired and a pair of SATA ports uses the same hardware inside
the motherboard chipset, so if one port goes bad, usually both of the
ports in the pair will be bad.

Have you tried physically swapping the drive positions in the case, so
the bad drive is in the place where a good drive works?

You mentioned having a PCI card with extra SATA ports.  Is that
actually a PCIe card?  I would hope so, as a PCI card is not fast
enough to run a single SATA port at full speed, and modern drives need
a 6 Gbit/s SATA port.  If it is a PCIe card that can do 6 Gbit/s, you
can try swapping drives to run from there instead of the motherboard.
The PCIe card will likely have a completely different SATA controller
and may work differently, so if what you are up against is a SATA
controller device driver bug in the kernel, you will be using a
different device driver that may not have that bug.

What is your motherboard?  There are known bugs in the device drivers
for old Nvidia motherboards that make some drives do bad things - I
have an old Nvidia board where my Samsung 1 Tbyte drive will not work
- I have to run if from a PCIe SATA port.  I bisected the kernel and
reported the changes that caused this, but to date it has not been
fixed.

Physically, how are your drives arranged in the PC?  Are they in a
drive cage that has them crammed together?  Do they all get reasonable
airflow?

One thing to try is see if you have enough room to operate the problem
drive outside the case.  I have three drives running like that and
they all run cool just by being outside the case and standing on their
sides, so they cool well by simple convection.  To make that work, I
used an empty card slot in the case to allow me to pull out a SATA
power cable and got some longer SATA data cables.  Leaving off the
backplate that normally covers an empty card slot allowed me to pull
the cables through easily and just sit the drives out the back of the
PC.

I have put some photos on my web server to show how it works:

http://www.jsw.gen.nz/mythtv/externaldrives/

The old blue rag underneath the three drives is to prevent noise - the
wooden table underneath picks up the drive vibrations and amplifies
them enough to make it quite annoying.  With the blue rag, they run
almost silently.


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