Re: Off topic: hardware tip

["J. R. Fox" jr_fox@xxxxxxxxxx]

Patricia M Godfrey wrote:

> If a drive--hard, floppy, CD, ZIP, whatever--starts acting flaky, one of
> the
> first things one should try is changing the cable.

> . . .

> Remember a few days ago I said that turning off power management caused the
> partition table to
> disappear? Well, that may have been the first landslip of a cascading
> failure of the IDE cable.

It need not even be the whole cable, although they can certainly go bad
various ways, usually having something to do with heat and age. Oxidation
builds up on the connectors. This can often be cleaned off, but may involve
more trouble than its worth. My fancy, custom SCSI cable has connectors to
support 3 hard drives. Only 2 of these connectors were in use. When one of
the hard drives started having mysterious failures (halting completely, with
endless thermal recal cycles just prior; intermittent boot-up failures), I
first suspected some cooling problem inside the box, as if one of the fans
had died. But this was not the case. After checking out all other apparent
possibilities, I disconnected that in-use connector, and reconnected with the
spare, never used one. It has been many months, and that problem has not
recurred since. During the last system rebuild, I also had to completely
replace the 2nd. SCSI cable, which supports all the slow devices (scanner,
etc.). That made some vexing problems involving the performance of the DAT
backup drive go away.

No matter how good the cable is, it may not last more than 3 years of steady
use. But many folks don't even keep a computer longer than that . . . .

Jordan