another hard drive failure story

[bogstad-e+AXbWqSrlAAvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org (Bill Bogstad)]

On Sun, Aug 16, 2009 at 2:03 PM, <edwardp-KK0ffGbhmjU at public.gmane.org> wrote:
>..
>
> Reading the issue that Seth had, this made me wonder if perhaps the
> ribbon cables running between the motherboard and CD/DVD drives might be
> bad. ?But then, why would the current and prior releases display I/O
> errors on those installs, but the third release back installed fine...

There are many different modes by which an ide controller and talk to
an ide drive over a cable: programmed IO,
DMA, UDMA, etc.  The OS software has some control over which mode is
used among the set that the controller, cable, and
drive all (theoretically) support.  It's very possible that the
default mode that your install CD  was using changed between
releases to one that wasn't reliable due to defects.  A network
upgrade would have only been driving the hard drive
(not the CD) so it's possible that's why you could do the upgrade to
the new OS, but not a bare install.  This is all
in the category of what I describe as 'plausible bullshit'.  Still
it's worth noting as a possibility.

Bill Bogstad