I have an Intel DG965RY MoBo. I used to run it with a Seagate 160 GB SATA drive and 512 MB DDR-2 RAM (and an Intel C2D CPU, among other peripherals...!) Recently I decided to upgrade to an additional 2 GB DDR2 RAM and a new SEAGATE SATA II 250 GB HDD - with all other hardware to remain as is.
I installed the new drive by myself and connected the cables. Put in the RAM. DUSTED off a little dirt inside the case with a brush, VERY CAREFULLY...! closed the case. Booted from an Arch Linux install CD and installed base system and GRUB. Installed Slackware too, as part of an intended triple boot with PC-BSD, but did not install LILO as I intend to use GRUB.Everything ran smoothly at install of both distros.
Then I powered off everything,and restarted. The system was SLOOOOW getting past the BIOS/POST - this had never been the case in the past. And then the HDD just kept whirring-clicking ominously. GRUB came up and failed at the stage 1.5 with a message saying file not found.
The weird part - if I hook this HDD to another computer at home, everything goes smoothly.I can boot from both installs. So the HDD is working. I tried switching cables to the one I had used with the old HDD. Both old and new cables and old and new HDD work on two other computers. On this one, the OLD disk too did not work. BIOS was slooow and not detecting the disk.
As I was fiddling around with changing this and that, at some point the BIOS detected the new HDD, but again boot died at the GRUB stage. So I reinstalled both OSes and once again all went well. Again after a power down and reboot, the same issues repeated again.
This time I decided to get radical and flashed the BIOS.On a reboot, BIOS went past as fast as usual, there was a boot screen with all options and both Arch and Slackware work well. I decided to power off and restart to see if the problem had really gone away. It seemed to. 3 poweroffs and 3 reboots later there was no trouble with booting from disk or CD. So I sighed relief and put everything back in place including the drive which I had taken off its bay to do all troubleshooting.
On the next reboot - ALL problems were back. Slow BIOS, soft intermittent HDD clicks, and also a "no bootable disk available" message.
That is it. I have gone through the procedure thrice now. Flash BIOS ( actually this is the same version I had even before the problem began, its just that it is the only thing that I tried that at least helps me get a temporary solution...) all is well. If I poweroff, sometimes on the second, sometimes on the fifth try(unpredictable as to when it occurs) the problem begins all over again.
I am typing all this using the Slackware install on the same HDD as is giving me all this trouble. If power it down now, I am sure I will have to reset the BIOS
removing or keeping the newly installed RAM does not affect this behaviour - either favorably, or adversely...!
Is is a power supply trouble...? What else could it be...? any help is deeply appreciated.
New hard disk, additional RAM - Trouble getting it to work
Linear Mode
