[NTLUG:Discuss] Lost drive

[Nathan Thern]

On Wed, Oct 26, 2011 at 1:26 PM, Michael Barnes <barnmichael at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Tue, 2011-10-25 at 14:37 -0500, Michael Barnes wrote:
>>>   When it boots up, the POST splashes
>>> the card and the drive.  fdisk -l /dev/sdb returns nothing.
>>>
>>> Any ideas on other things to check?  At first, it wouldn't even boot
>>> until I commented out the drive mounting in fstsab.
> I commented out all references to the drive in fstab and the computer
> booted up just fine.  fdisk -l /dev/sdb showed properly.  I
> uncommented the necessary lines in fstab and mounted the drive, then
> mounted the various binds and its now working fine.  I think the
> problem was the order of things in fstab.  Anyhow, its working and I
> don't want to touch it any further unless it croaks again.

I had a similar, but less catastrophic, problem on an old pentium
running debian with a PCI sata adaptor & large SATA drive.
Occasionally on reboot the rootfs drive and the sata drive would swap
drive letters -- sata would take /dev/sda instead of /dev/sdb & rootfs
would take /dev/sdb instead of /dev/sda. The system would still boot
because fstab ID'd the rootfs with its UUID. I did the same for the
sata drive in fstab & now the SATA gets mounted properly on every
reboot.

However, the reason for all my reboots still exists. Occasionally,
especially after some heavy access, the SATA drive just disappears.
It's no longer mounted & fdisk -l can't find it. The only way to get
it back is with a full reboot. I haven't investigated yet how to
unload & then reload kernel modules, but I'm hopeful that I can also
bring the drive back that way.

You may have solved your problem for good, but I wouldn't be surprised
if your SATA drive goes offline again some day.

regards,
NT