This morning, as it has done for the past week or so, my PC switched itself on at 9:00. It's OK, I told it to do that, it's not posessed or anything. The noise of all the fans wakes me up. Anyway.
The problem was that instead of booting up the operating system like it normally does, it just hung after scanning the IDE devices. Just froze solid, and didn't respond to keypresses (ALT-CTRL_DEL didn't work, and the num/caps/scroll lights didn't come on when I pressed them).
I pressed the reset switch, and the same thing happened. And again. Then I switched it off, waited ten seconds and switched it on again. This time it booted up properly, got to the LILO prompt and booted Linux. Everything was good.
Then I told Linux to reboot, and it got stuck at the same point again. I switched it off and waited for 10 secs and started it again. It worked, but this time I chose to boot into XP. It worked but everything was soooo soooooow. It took over 15 minutes to boot into XP, and I could see the screen redrawing and everything.
So my question is this: what the hell's going on? Something's gone wrong with the PC that affects the BIOS and XP, but not Linux. I imagine it's either my hard disc dying, or the DMA controller on my motherboard. Anyone?
BTW, I have four IDE controllers, two UDMA/33 and two UDMA/66 (I think). Attached to the former is my DVD drive, CD-RW and Zip250. The BIOS gets past detecting all these OK. Attached to the UDMA/66 is my HDD, and it hangs after detecting this
Cheers.