On 2020-10-22 19:40, Paul wrote:
bad sector wrote:
On 2020-10-22 12:53, Paul wrote:

Sometimes taking digital camera pictures of the BIOS screen in
advance, is a good enough method.


Some Asus motherboards are famous for their bad defaults choices
in the BIOS, requiring things to be corrected over and over
again.

new battery

I do take pictures of the monitor when hot

onto something but for now I'm still poking around in the dark and
there seem to be multiple

issues involved


For starters i bought this DURGOD usb gaming keyboard

and 2 out of 10 boots I have to cycle it into another usb port or I
don't get to see BIOS with 'Del' nor get to select anything from
the frozen boot menu. Another solution is to immediately plug in my
old keyboard to bypass this issue. I don't know if it's a keyboard


or a mobo fault.

Another problem might revolve around the sata

rack with mobile drawers for the drives. The last

dozen or so attempts I could not get any drive plugged into the #4
slot detected. Suspecting the drive that usually goes in there I
plugged it in bybassing the rack and then it got detected although
I also wondered if its 22,000 hours could be a factor. When I
initially posted this drive was taking a backup, now recognised OK
on a direct sata cable fdisk showed it as a dos drive with no
partition. Gdisk showed the gpt table and the only partition but

on mounting it it was empty. When I plug this drive into its usual
#4 slot it doesn't get detected, if I plug it into the #3 swapping
with the one in there then neither #3 nor #4 ger detected. A lot
of this is way over my head.


The boot drive is a brand new ssd and booting one of the
installations on it I got a filesystem error, yet fsck from another
installation proved it 'clean'.

This was a Suse-Leap partition, and subsequent

boots on it went without any problems.

So I'm like exhausted for right but will next connect all drives
directly bypassing the mobile tray setup and using the old
keyboard.

Later


I have had a Western Digital drive damage a SATA port on my
Southbridge. My Typing Machine only has five working Southbridge SATA
ports at the moment. The sixth port is dead. The hard drive that did
this is "retired" and is not used as a spare for OS installs
either.

The SATA interface has a limit on common mode voltage range. I don't
know if a SATA driver on one hardware, can manage to create enough
voltage to damage the

receiver interface on a second device. It really should not be able
to do that. Yet... I have a dead port.

While trying to connect the sata cable into it I broke
the high-time drive's SATA connector... I guess the
gods spared me a lot of useless grief minutes before
the debate

With this drive now out of it, I placed it into slot #4
leaving #3 empty, bios picked it up no problem so that
clears the sata circuit including the disk rack

I still get the 'press 4' stuff and complaints about
no overclocking, I answer the keyboard issue in
another answer, plus I have a strictly OS issue
that I will take to the suse group. Soooooo, it
looks like still a multiple-cause issue with ONE culprit
down, the old WD spinner.