Abit IP35 Pro Issue or install issue

[JimmyGosling]

So it's been a long couple of nights as I try to get down to the bottom of this one with not a great amount of payoff, so I thought I would solicit the community for some suggestions.

The other night while taking a look at my movies I noticed that some that existed in my personal home were not showing up on my list, even though I was using that user.  I have no idea how long this has been going on for, but there it was.  I decided it would just be quicker to move those files over to the public repository.  Suddenly I have no videos.

Not a problem, I decide I'll restart the server and they should be back.  It wouldn't reload however, got stuck on one of the startup scripts.  I wish I could remember, but something along the lines of serial I think (In relation to SATA drives?)

Anyway, I figured what the heck, let's try a reinstall, I slipped in the DVD and booted off of it.  It found the current install, asked me if I would like to keep the home directory.  I said yes.  Then it stops.  I saw on the screen say "Error: no hard drive found" and then finally "find: ./var not found".  It stops there. 

So now I'm left with nothing.  I tried a couple more times with the same results.  Sometimes it would stop on "Error: no hard drives found' and halt, sometimes it would get to the next stage.

So at this point I'm not sure if I have a hard drive failure (both of them?), motherboard, or something else. 
I updated the BIOS, no change
I plugged each of the drives into an external adapter and hooked them up to ubuntu on my laptop.  They read, everything is still there.  So hard drive failure is out thankfully.
I plugged them back into the server, ran ubuntu off the DVD and checked for drives, nothing there.

So I've got a couple of ideas for when I get back tonight including plugging the external drive into the server and see what happens, but for the moment, though I would like to move things off this drive, I don't have anything large enough to move them too.

So I'm reaching out.  Any other ideas from everyone here.  I didn't see this issue around anywhere.

As stated above, I'm running an Abit IP35 Pro motherboard and a couple of WD 55GB sata drives.

[Crumble]

were you using software raid? ubcd has software that will check the controller.  I doubt both drives went bad, highly unlikely, did you run fsck yet.  Also since your having hdd data errors with install errors i'd check the ram too just to be safe.


Crumble

[JimmyGosling]

Good suggestions from both of you. 
Here is what I have found:
Both HDDs appear to be alive and well.  No errors on them.  I used something called smartctl to check the drive status.  Every other utility I spun through has echoed the same.  I can also see all the data on these drives if I use a connection other than internal sata.  When I hooked up the drives in an external usb or external sata I could see and read all data.  These drives were not hooked up in an array of any sort as a side note.  A memory check showed that there were no issues there either.

So long story short, this is looking more and more like a hardware issue.  The thing that I can't figure out though is why I would be able t see the drive on my post screen but then be unable to access it when I'm in any sort of operating system.

I don't currently have any spare drives sitting around other than an old IDE.  That really wouldn't help my in diagnosing this issue however.  I could however probably leverage it to be the main drive for a short time as I get things sorted out, using the other drives externally, but I've already ordered a couple new drives to set up in an array.  Looks like I might be throwing a new motherboard on that list as well.

I did notice that newegg had a lot of ill reviews for this MB due to quality and then RMA (which I'm outside of the 30 days by a couple of months now anyway).  Therefore I would recommend to stay away from this board, or at least think twice, if you were considering.

thanks again guys for your great suggestions.

[JimmyGosling]

So right after posting this last time I realized that even though I have narrowed the issues down to a sata issue, I have failed to do a search on this MB and sata specific issues.
Well here it is: http://codeandlife.com/2008/05/22/linux-sata-problem-with-abit-ip35-e/

I'm not certain it's going to work, but it's a lead, and it makes some sense as to why I had boot issues when I restarted the server with any USB devices plugged in.

[JimmyGosling]

Well a slightly sad end to the story.  I did install my old IDE as the main drive and reinstalled the OS.  Looks like it's back to the square one in that regard.  No big deal. The sad part is that my old main drive seems to have lost all of it's media.  Not all of it's files, just it's media.  Something must have gone wrong during my re-installation resulting in it wiping the drive clean rather than preserving it.  There is no way of definitively telling, so I'm going to have to assume I slipped up somewhere.