FYI this is resolved, but it was one of the more elusive hardware diagnoses as far as common sense so I'm curious how quickly people can nail it down. I'll post the first bit of "observational data" and then follow-up with more later.
Rig:
Q6600, 4GB Mushkin RAM, 320MB 8800GTS, 1x200 GB Maxtor SATA, 1x320GB Seagate SATA (both 7200 rpm), Lite-on DVD+R, no floppy.
MBR is on SATA1 (Maxtor) and points to GRUB (boot manager) on SATA2 (Seagate) where you can boot to XPP (Maxtor) or Ubuntu (Seagate).
This rig was built about 3 months ago. Has been rock solid ever since in Ubuntu, VM-XPP (running the xpp partition under vmware) or direct booting into XPP.
Came home from dinner one night and the machine came up from the screensaver but was unresponsive. Rebooted and it would post and shutdown. Reset the cmos and got into the bios - no temp issues - so I booted but it failed with a "non system disk" error.
Booted ubuntu CD and ran memtest...no errors
disconnected SATA2 and it would boot, try to load grub and fail (it should fail as grub is on SATA2 which is now missing).
Reconnected SATA2 but notice I can't see it in the BIOS!
Changed SATA channels...still no sign of the Seagate... Maxtor shows up fine but is not bootable...
What would you try next?
[brought to you by "Puzzles by Mize Corp."]
Rig:
Q6600, 4GB Mushkin RAM, 320MB 8800GTS, 1x200 GB Maxtor SATA, 1x320GB Seagate SATA (both 7200 rpm), Lite-on DVD+R, no floppy.
MBR is on SATA1 (Maxtor) and points to GRUB (boot manager) on SATA2 (Seagate) where you can boot to XPP (Maxtor) or Ubuntu (Seagate).
This rig was built about 3 months ago. Has been rock solid ever since in Ubuntu, VM-XPP (running the xpp partition under vmware) or direct booting into XPP.
Came home from dinner one night and the machine came up from the screensaver but was unresponsive. Rebooted and it would post and shutdown. Reset the cmos and got into the bios - no temp issues - so I booted but it failed with a "non system disk" error.
Booted ubuntu CD and ran memtest...no errors
disconnected SATA2 and it would boot, try to load grub and fail (it should fail as grub is on SATA2 which is now missing).
Reconnected SATA2 but notice I can't see it in the BIOS!
Changed SATA channels...still no sign of the Seagate... Maxtor shows up fine but is not bootable...
What would you try next?
[brought to you by "Puzzles by Mize Corp."]