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.

Paul