'Disk not ready'

[willy]

Hi all,
A friend of mine has the message 'Disk not ready - System halted' and a
black screen during start up.
This has only happened twice in the last 2 days, no sign of a problem
before that.
I'm not sure whether we should be starting to panic re HDD pending
failure or not...
TIA, Willy

[Bill Leary]

"willy" > wrote in message
...
> A friend of mine has the message 'Disk not ready - System halted' and a
> black screen during start up.
> This has only happened twice in the last 2 days, no sign of a problem
> before that.
> I'm not sure whether we should be starting to panic re HDD pending
> failure or not...

I would (be starting, that is, not going into full blown panic yet) :)

Make sure your backups are current.

On the other hand, I had a similar problem with one of mine. I built this
machine and after a few months I got one of these. Then another. And a few
more. I took the drive out and took it to work to run full diags on it (we did
that sort of thing there) and found no errors. Put it back in and no problems
for a few more months, then it started again. The upshot was that the drive was
fine. The connector on the cable was slightly bad. After a few months it
worked itself just loose enough that when the machine warmed up it would give
problems. If I shut down overnight, it was OK for a while the next day, or
maybe even the whole day depending on the weather or time of year or whatever.
Or if I took the drive out to check it, that "fixed" the problem for a few
months because I'd re-seat the cable when I put it back in.

On the other other hand (and why I'd be *starting* to panic) I've seen this as a
failure scenario on drives with their motors or tachs starting to fail. when
they're first turned on they can't spin up fast enough to pass internal test,
and thus don't signal READY, or the tachs don't register correctly, giving the
same failure. Once they warm up a bit, they'll make it and run OK. This
usually (always, from what I've seen) gets worse to the point where the drive
fails completely.

One other thing I've seen ME do a time or two is get confused about a removable
disk being a hard disk and complaining that it's not ready because it couldn't
get ready before the device check occurred. Happened to a system at work with a
ZIP drive configured incorrectly in BIOS. This doesn't sound like your problem,
though.

- Bill

[willy]

Thanks Bill,
I see how it goes, it hasn't done it today......fingers crossed.
Willy

Bill Leary wrote:
> "willy" > wrote in message
> ...
>
>>A friend of mine has the message 'Disk not ready - System halted' and a
>>black screen during start up.
>>This has only happened twice in the last 2 days, no sign of a problem
>>before that.
>>I'm not sure whether we should be starting to panic re HDD pending
>>failure or not...
>
>
> I would (be starting, that is, not going into full blown panic yet) :)
>
> Make sure your backups are current.
>
> On the other hand, I had a similar problem with one of mine. I built this
> machine and after a few months I got one of these. Then another. And a few
> more. I took the drive out and took it to work to run full diags on it (we did
> that sort of thing there) and found no errors. Put it back in and no problems
> for a few more months, then it started again. The upshot was that the drive was
> fine. The connector on the cable was slightly bad. After a few months it
> worked itself just loose enough that when the machine warmed up it would give
> problems. If I shut down overnight, it was OK for a while the next day, or
> maybe even the whole day depending on the weather or time of year or whatever.
> Or if I took the drive out to check it, that "fixed" the problem for a few
> months because I'd re-seat the cable when I put it back in.
>
> On the other other hand (and why I'd be *starting* to panic) I've seen this as a
> failure scenario on drives with their motors or tachs starting to fail. when
> they're first turned on they can't spin up fast enough to pass internal test,
> and thus don't signal READY, or the tachs don't register correctly, giving the
> same failure. Once they warm up a bit, they'll make it and run OK. This
> usually (always, from what I've seen) gets worse to the point where the drive
> fails completely.
>
> One other thing I've seen ME do a time or two is get confused about a removable
> disk being a hard disk and complaining that it's not ready because it couldn't
> get ready before the device check occurred. Happened to a system at work with a
> ZIP drive configured incorrectly in BIOS. This doesn't sound like your problem,
> though.
>
> - Bill
>
>