I have a dev server machine running Ubuntu 12.04. For a long while it's been throwing intermittent errors where it would suddenly tell me "File system is read only" or drop into a GRUB error console on boot. I've done disk checks, bad blocks, etc. and no real problems with the main SATA drive were detected.

Finally the drive would not be detected at all-- but neither would other drives I plugged in (via SATA).

I plugged the supposedly "bad" drive into another server and it worked fine, no issues, for days-- so I assumed the motherboard had a bad SATA controller, and replaced the motherboard with an identical model.

I replaced the drive into the original machine with the new motherboard, rebooted-- and the same issues-- I/O errors, failure to read the drive at all, dropping into GRUB, etc.

I'm wondering if there could be some other issue with this machine, that's not related to the drive-- possibly power supply?

Thanks for ideas