FreeBSD 6.1 problems on AMD64 Athlon 3800 - crashes from day 1

[O. Hartmann]

Lars. Tunkrans wrote:
> Angie Ahl wrote:
>>
>> I'm waiting for some answers to exactly what chipsets on the
>> motherboard etc. Is there anything I should really check for if/when
>> I can get back into the box.
>>
>> Thanks very very much
>>
>> Angie
>
> Hi,  
>  One thing  that I have experienced  myself  in  new   hardware   is
> substandard   SATA  cables.
> One of my friends also resolved a situation where MS-Windows  would
> not install on a SATA disk
> by changeing  the SATA cable. I have a shuttle  chassie  with an
> Athlon64  3800 , 1 GB  RAM  and thee  Segate SATA  320 GB  drives.
> this box  failed  mysteriously  and had unexplained HUNG situations.
>
> After I changed  to  SATA-300  cables  with clip-locks  on the
> contactors  all problems  went away.
>
> //Lars
Hello.
You're right, I had a similar problem on my AMD64 box. One of two 200GB SATA 300  drives showed up errors after every third, fourth, sometimes tenth boot and then suddenly while running. Changing the SATA cable resolved the problem. SATA cabling is a piece of several tenth, not to say hundredth of an Euro - but it seems to be capable to bring down a whole server.
All right, but this is one aspect. If Angie has already let the admins having exchanged RAM and motherboard and even more the CPU, I would suspect the PSU - but this depends on what the local Admin can see on the console if there is any. If the box hangs during init of drives, maybe the cabling is faulty. If not, I would exchange the PSU first ...

Regards,
Oliver