To get right to the point, I had forgotten that the SAM uses the same 2032 battery that has plagued so many of us A1 users. Even when I saw it, I doubted it could be the problem -- my SAM is only about a year old, and I didn't start using it regularly until March of this year. It couln't be bad yet. But in the course of reseating my boards and cords I removed and tested it. A full 0.1v, fading fast to about 0.05 while I watched!
I replaced it, and so far I seem to have my SAM back. What in the world is that battery in charge of?
Original statement of problem:
Today I have successfully and unsuccessfully booted several times. Each unsuccessful boot and at some time during activity with each successful boot so far, the hard drive activity light has come on and stayed on. And I get alerts about unreadable formats on different partitions on my hard drive (three different ones so far, DH0:, DH1: and DH4).
I kept notes of the first three instances, which I will hide to save space for those not wanting to read them, if I can remember how to do so. But the problem has persisted four or five more times so far. I'm happy to have reached this point this time.
Hidden Text - Click to Show :
2012-07-23 After cold boot, did warm reboot for sound. Splash screen came up
but hard drive activity light stays on steady and soon screen goes black. Tried
warm reboot again, Workbench came up, with sound.
Used YAM. Then tried to launch OWB. Again nothing happens as hard drive
activity light stays on steady. After some time I got this alert:
Volume 'Internet' (DH1: sii3114ide.device unit 0
There was an error while accessing this volume.
General device failure.
The disk is in an unreadable format.
error code = 20
io_command = 2
io_Offset = 1333923804
io_Length = 1024
io_Actual = 0
Fearing that I might not have time to write down all of that I tried to
launch SGrab, but temporarily lost mouse control. After waiting a while I
again did a warm reboot, and after a period of inactivity, got Workbench again
and was able to successfully launch and use OWB. So far, all is well.
Used NotePad to type above. Saved, and then launched Timberwolf, which
startted to bring up my homepage surprisingly quickly, but stopped in the
process, with harddrive light again steady. And a repeat of the above alert,
except this time io_command was 49152, io_Offset -486527488, and
io_Length was 32768.
I clicked Retry, and noticed thereafter, no mouse pointer, and Limpid Clock
stopped.
Hit the reset button on tower. After a long wait (HD activity light on steady)
a big gray "Workbench Screen" came up with a "Smart Filesystem Request,"
informing me that "Volume 'OS4.1' (DH0: sii3114.ide)" was having the same
problems I had with Internet: before, this time io_command = 2, io_Offset =
3500032, and io_Length = 1024 again; the other values the same each time.
Is this a sure sign of a hard drive suddenly gone bad? I did install an extra fan and connected the front audio jacks to the motherboard a couple days ago. I guess I will try disconnecting both of those and see if it makes a difference. Meanwhile, I worry about whether I will be able to get back on and see if anyone responds to this.
Last edited by kilaueabart on Wed Jul 25, 2012 3:00 am, edited 1 time in total.
It might not be the whole drive, it might be only the boot partition. If you can access other partitions OK, then I suggest copying what you can to a spare partition, formatting that one (Quick Format, of course) and copying everything back again.
Thanks. This probably shows deplorable ignorance, but how would I know? I thought being able to use Workbench but having other partitions reported "unreadable" meant the root partition was better off than the others.
Moot question now. First half dozen boot tries this morning, disk activity ceased completely at "Now launching Kickstart." Later I was able to regularly reach the splash screen (or whatever you call it) before the disk went into permanent activity.
Time to do what I probably should have started with: open the thing up and reseat everything.
