[tlug] Potentially Dying Hard Disk Questions

["Zev Blut" <zb@example.com>]

Hello,
I wondering if anyone any comments or experience with dying hard
disks.  I have a, less than a year old, Maxtor 120GB 2MB cache IDE hard
disk that is acting up on me.

The symptoms are:

* Every once in a while the drive starts to make strange noises, like
speaker clicks or a suction cup being pulled out of suction.  It is
not the normal hard disk grinding noise I know from older disks.

* Less often the system freezes when accessing the disk.  Is it
common for a Linux system to totally block until the disk comes back
alive?  Let me rephrase that does the kernel block on some IDE based
operations or is this a motherboard thing?

* I have also had the drive disappear from the /dev list by the.
This required a reboot for the disk to reappear.  Are there any
commands that might be used to get the disk back without a reboot?
Also, once I received I/O errors that prevented me from using the halt
command.  I think that might be related to it dropping out.

Note: This was a Red Hat 9 install, but I am also using Gentoo on
another disk to access it with similar problems.

Luckily, I have a new hard disk and have most of my data backed up, so
I can stop using the disk if need be.

I am curious if anyone knows of any potential reasons why this disk
would do the above? Could it be heat related, bad system
configuration, BIOS, IDE cable or is it just a bad disk?

Also, would there be any danger to the rest of the system if I left it
in it with my new drive?  Of course, it is on the second IDE channel.

Thanks,
Zev