Unix PC Boot problems

[Robert K Anton]

I have been experiencing problems booting my unix-pc.  The symptoms
are failure to boot after system has been off more than a few days.
It seems that the longer the system has not been ON the harder it
is to boot from hard disk.  After going through a few cycles of
turning the machine on and off it finally boots.  The no. of on/off
cycles seems to be proportional to how long the machine has be turned
off.  I believe that some discussion in this News group has centered
on this problem ------ however, until it happens to you the article
just gets deleted.  I remember some discussion about lubricating
the spindle  -- this to me seems rather bizzare.  Others seem to
think that a quick power cycle will do the trick - their philosphy
is that the hard disk does no reach to proper RPM in time so if
the machine is turned off then on quickly the harddisk will reach
proper RPM from the previous momentum i.e. it was still spinning
the second time around.  Maybe that winter is around the corner
my hard disk is stiffing up.  
I would have thought that Convergent could have provided some more 
information to the user than those solid chars continously being 
printed on the screen when the machine doesn't boot.


If anybody has some recommendations I'd appreciate them.