OpenSUSE Hardware :: Random Error - Could Not See SATA Drive ?

I experienced a strange random error that appears to have been my PC losing contact with the PC's 1.5 TB SATA drive.

This happened once (thus far only once - about two hours ago) on my Intel Core i7 920 PC with a Asus P6T Deluxe V2 mother board running openSUSE-11.4 with KDE-4.4.4. A reboot failed to fix the problem but a cold shut down restart did.

Some details ...

I had a zillion apps open, connected to my mother's PC in North America (from here in Europe) using vnc, had thunderbird, firefox, many konsole sessions, and various leafpad editor sessions.

Firefox appeared to hang, so I tried to close the Firefox page, but the PC appeared frozen (although the mouse would move). Then after about 60 seconds, the screen flashed, firefox closed (crashed may be more accurate) and I had my desktop back, ... sort of .... And I was able to go to the desktop area where vnc was running and access my mother's PC. But I was missing almost all the icons off my KDE destkop and most the icons off the panel at the bottom of the desktop.

I tried going to <CTRL><ALT><F1> and then <CTRL><ALT><F7> but that made no difference. I tried going to <CTRL><ALT><F1> to login but it would not let me login as a regular user, nor as root. Nor could I ssh into the PC. After <CTRL><ALT><F7> back at the crippled GUI, I typed 'shutdown -r now' (as root) but the command was not recognized. Neither was 'top' (as a regular user), nor 'fdisk' (as root). Dir was recognized as a regular user as was CD. But I did not believe the information those commands were giving me (it did not appear up to date).

Eventually I killed X with <CTRL><ALT><Backspace> (twice) and then forced a shutdown start with <CTRL><ALT><DELETE>, but then the PC hung during the shutdown, with the hard drive light on solid. That never happens. After a minute of that I decided to hit the 'hardware' reset. The PC restarted, but was incredibly slow to go through the motherboard boot menu's and it reported the hard drive not detected and would not boot. I did a <CTRL><ALT><DELETE> to restart, and pressed DEL to go to BIOS, and then noted in BIOS that the SATA drive was not detected.

I checked the temperature and the PC was a nominal cool temperature (38 to 40 deg c).

I then switched OFF the PC. I also turned the OFF switch on the back OFF for good measure. I waited a minute. And I turned ON again the PC.

The PC booted normally as if nothing had happened.

Most bizarre and a bit of a fright. My Linux is usually rock solid.

Anyway, ... no more investigation for now. I'm doing a massive backup of all data since my last backup. This will take a while as I have about 400 GB of home movies (at various stages of processing) from my home video camera to backup to an external hard drive.

I may pickup another 2TB external drive this weekend, just to ensure I have multiple backups.