Big HD problems - How stuffed am I?

[Damon Muller <damon@empire.net.au>]

Hi Folks,

Been having some problems with two of the HDs in one of my machines.
Both are Quantum TMs (a 2.3 and a 3.2, i believe), both on the first IDE
chanel.

The drives will pause and make a funny noise (which is never a good
sign, AFAIK). Then I'll get an error message, like the ones below.

irq timeout: status=0x80 {Busy}

hdb: read_intr: status=0xff {Busy}

ide0: reset timed-out, status=0xd0

That's not all of them, but as many of them as I managed to copy down.

For a while they would pause, give the error, and then start up again,
but lately my computer has completely frozen up a few times, and now it
refuses to boot at all.

It seems like both of the drives have the problem, although one was
getting a little more scrambled than the other. Seems sort of strange
that they would both die at the same time (they were bought at different
times from different places)!

The other IDE channel has a CD-ROM and another HD on it (a 1.2G
Seagate), and doesn't seem to have any problems that I have seen.

Anyone have any idea what is causing these probelms? Have both my HDs
died at once (that sort of hits the hip pocket in a big way!), or is it
something else that might be contributing to it?

Thanks,

damon

--
Damon Muller              | Did a large procession wave their torches
(damon@empire.net.au)     | As my head fell in the basket,
Network Administrator     | And was everyone dancing on the casket...
EmpireNET                 |                      - TBMG, "Dead"