Is it the hardware or the OS?

[Jason Hackney <unicycle@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

I apologize for the length, but this is driving me bananas.

I'm having this problem (among others) that's driving me nuts lately...

Every couple of weeks, my hard drive on IDE1 (master) spools up and just
keeps going until I physically turn the power off to the computer.

What happens: I'm using the computer and everything is working just
fine.  The HDD LED lights up.  Nothing unusual, but it stays lit for
more than a few seconds.  It's constant.  About a month ago, I let it go
all day thinking it would turn itself off.  It didn't.

So, I log on to the Linux machine, su to root and start poking around.
Output from 'ps ax | grep mbd' looks something like:

725 ?     S     0:00 nmbd
726 ?     D     0:01 smbd -l /var/log/samba -s /etc/smb.conf
728 ?     D     0:01 smbd -l /var/log/samba -s /etc/smb.conf
729 ?     S     0:01 smbd -l /var/log/samba -s /etc/smb.conf
734 ?     S     0:01 smbd -l /var/log/samba -s /etc/smb.conf
735 ?     D     0:01 smbd -l /var/log/samba -s /etc/smb.conf
799 pts/0 S     0:00 grep mbd

Well, it looks something like that, this is the best I could fudge from
memory.  I was able to kill all the sleeping processes, but couldn't get
the uninterruptable processes to budge using signal -9.  (I don't really
know what I'm doing anyway)

So, I decide to issue the shutdown command: 'shutdown -h now'

Shutdown starts, then seems to hang at the SWAP part (can't remember
what that says).  I did ^F10 and looked at the messages for the shutdown
and I see the following over and over:

ide1: reset timed out, status=0x80
hdc: status timeout: status=0x80 { Busy }
hdc: drive not ready for command

Ok, so this isn't looking good.  I tried to avoid it, but I can't...  I
hit the reset button.  Now it gets interesting.  Following POST, during
the autodetection of the drives, all (one) IDE0 devices can be found,
but nothing (two devices) is found on IDE1.  (Note: Autodetection was
turned off the very first time this happened, the drives were "manually"
configured). IDE0 is a Maxtor HDD, IDE1 has the same make and model of
HDD as IDE0 as well as a CD-ROM drive.  So, it seems a warm boot doesn't
work.  I tried a cold boot.  All my drives were detected and I go
through the "...drives not cleanly unmounted..." hoo haa for everything
and (this time) everything seems to have been repaired.  Things did not
fix themselves last time, and since I'm not familiar with system repair,
I had to reinstall everything (My system backs up essential files every
eight hours, so I do have backups!)

I'm worried there may be an underlying problem and this may happen with
more frequency.  I can't seem to find any problems with the drive
causing the problem and I suspect it's my motherboard (IDE1 controller)
but can't find a way to confirm that.

Has anybody experienced anything similar?  Or have an idea what's going
on here?  I have a Windows98 machine connected to the Linux box
(application/file server if you will).  I've had this problem
intermittently for the last year, but it hasn't become serious enough
(yes, I'm lazy) until this past month.

Thanks in advance, and I apologize again for the excessive verbiage.

Jason