Debian Hardware :: Unusual System Failure - Hard Drive Bad Sector
Sep 11, 2015
It all started about a week after upgrading to Jessie and I had an unusual system failure, in that the CPU went to 100% usage and the hard drive light was on constantly. The keyboard and mouse were were non-responsive. Not having REISUB enabled I did the "stupid" thing and pushed the reset button on the computer. BAD BOY! As a result the computer would not boot and I had to use a live CD to format the drive and install Wheezy (I had the CD).
After installing Wheezy, everything worked well for about 3 days and then it did the same thing. Fortunately I had REISUB enabled and was able to reboot. I looked at the syslog and found a segfault with colord-sane and, after some research that suggested colord-sane might be a problem, I set UseSane=1 in colord.conf . Things seemed to be okay for about 4 days.
Well, after all that I had another problem today with booting. During boot I got an error message saying that there was some hard drive problem and that I needed to log in and run fsck, which I did . There were I believe 4 INODE errors that I was asked if I wanted to repair, to which I responded yes. After that the system booted correctly. After booting and entering the Gnome Classic desktop I looked at the Disk Utility and checked the SMART data. There is now 1 bad sector where before there were none. The drive is a one year old WD 500GB Velociraptor.
Don't know if this is relevant, but in the days before this latest "crash" I had downloaded about 8 movies using bittorrent. Could this have overtaxed the HDD?
I guess my questions are: When fsck "repaired" the disk would it have moved any data from the bad sector to a new location? What may have caused the sector to go bad ? Should I be buying a new hard drive?
The system seems to boot okay,at this time, so I assume that no critical system files were affected. Just curious as to how I should proceed. First is BACK UP my data. Got that !
One more thing I just thought of is that every time it "crashed", I was using LXDE.
I have been researching the web for a program which will allow me to backup my entire hard drive so that I can restore my system if need be. I am however unsure which is the best one to use if I want to achieve this:Somehow I want to back up my hard drive containing my ubuntu system byte for byte so that if the hard drive were to fail I could simply go to the store, get a new hard drive, restore my backup and be up and running again without having to do any re installments of ubuntu or any other programs for that matter.
What is the easiest program that does this? I would like it to support incremental backup.rsync with the "Back in Time interface"?bacula?
I just upgraded to Fedora 11. (I decided to give 64bit a try and I am extremely impressed.Not one problem at all! Kudos to the devs.) Whenever I log in I get the Palimpsest Disk Utility telling me two of my hard drives have a reallocated sector count.I have two 1.5Tb Seagate drives (model #: ST31500341AS). One is a backup of the other. On the first disk the disk utility tells me I have 22 reallocated sectors and 53 on the second. I've been on Google on discovered that there is no easy way to fix this and that a few bad sectors are okay but too many is a sign of imminent drive failure. This obviously concerns me because both my main drive and its backup are showing errors.
I went to Seagate's website and downloaded their diagnostic software (Seatools for DOS) and it passed both of these drives.So, questions: is it possible that Fedora is giving me a false positive? If not, is 22 and 53 sectors something to be concerned about? If so, should I contact Seagate and see if I can pull warranty on these drives? Is there a way to repair this damage?
I have a flash drive that I regularly use on my laptop. If I unplug the flash drive without first unmounting it, I get a popup notification of a kernel failure (with diagnostics sent to kerneloops.org). Then, if I attempt to shut down the system via the console, it hangs on "The system is going down for halt/reboot NOW!" and doesn't actually shut down. Using Gnome's graphical System > Shut Down feature just logs me out and sends me to the login screen; the shutdown feature from there does nothing. I have to disconnect the power cord on the laptop in order to shut it down, and I don't like doing this.
System: 32-bit Debian Squeeze stable with kernel version 2.6.32-5-686, running Gnome 2.30.2, on an Acer Aspire 5570z.
I use Keepassx to store my passwords and keep the keyfile for my password database on the flash drive in question. I mention this just in case it helps determine what's causing the failure.
As you are probably aware that WD released new drives ranging from 1TB to 2TB with native support for 4K sector size. And as most of stuff written online is regarding Windows and their support for 4K, my question is has anyone already started to use it under linux?
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I'm thinking about getting one of these drives: 1TB WD10EARS or 1.5TB WD15EARS
I'm using Debian Lenny so my questions are: is fdisk automatically recognizes that that drive is 4K drive, or it totally ignores it and partition is as 512byte one? In windows if no 4K support is available it would emulate it and performance would be downgraded. Do I need to enable any specific components in kernel so 4K drive is supported? I wanted to make sure there would be no data loss if I select 4K partition type.
Upon installing Fedora on my Samsung NC10, I loved it. It feels stable and isn't cluttered with pointless apps. However I was immediately greeted by Palimsest Disk Utility warning me that the 'reallocated sector count' on my hard drive is going bad. I'm not too sure what any of it means but here's the statistics;
I am trying to install Ubuntu to an external usb hard drive (WD Elements SE). I am also choosing to install the grub bootloader to this disk (/dev/sdb) because I do not want anything modified on the internal drive. The installation appears to go okay, but when I try to boot to the usb drive, I get the error, "no boot sector on usb device" and it immediately falls back to my interal drive. I have tried this installation with both 10.10 (amd64) and 11.04 (amd64). How can I fix this?
I've been running Karmic happily for several weeks now. Today when I came home from work I was greeted by a notification informing me that me external hard drive may be failing due to the fact that it has many bad sectors. I am disinclined to believe this, due to the fact that the hard drive is less than 2 months old. It is a 1 terabyte seagate external drive. Does anyone know whether this is a bug in Karmic, or should I be backing up my data asap?
I have (had?) a 36GB 10000rpm disc and a 500GB 7200rpm disc on my machine. I had Windows 7 and Fedora 12 installed on the faster disc with the larger one as storage (for videos etc etc). Yesterday I tried to install Fedora 13 on the fast one wiping off Windows 7 and Fedora 12 in the process. So I told Anaconda just to install on the smaller disc and the install seemed to be going perfectly until it had installed something over 900 of the 1200 or so of the packages it was supposed to be going to install when the monitor screen went blank (black) and the monitor could not detect any video and switched itself off. Trying to switch the monitor on again it still found nothing. Watching the hard-drive and DVD drive lights I waited until it had finished installing (when, of course, it also ejected the disc). I then tried to reboot the computer without the disc and it stopped at the motherboard flash screen as it did (and does) when I try to boot with the Fedora 13 install disc (and also with my old Fedora 12 install disc).
I have not touched the hardware in any way. Before I downloaded Fedora 13 (and after I'd backed everything up) I had opened the case to check how much dust was in the CPU cooler fins but since there was little I just very gently brushed and Hoovered - the machine worked for a couple of hours thereafter while I downloaded Fedora 13 burned it to a DVD and for most of the install as above.I updated the BIOS with ASUS EZ Flash and but it has not solved the problem.
Having disconnected the "faulty" disc I have installed Fedora 13 on the large slower 500GB disc and it works OK but if I connect the faster 36GB disc (before trying to boot, of course) I just get to the motherboard flash screen.If the disc failed why/how did the computer continue to install Fedora 13 from the DVD? Is there any significance in the monitor having gone blank?
I was testing out Ubuntu 10.04 on both the a desktop and a laptop (both HP...I don't remember the particular models but if asked I will find out). It worked fine on the desktop. When I booted the laptop with Ubuntu it worked fine. When I tried to connect it to the internet it seemed to go okay. I mean it asked for the network password and everything. But as soon as the signal was recognized I got a warning that said "Hard drive failure is imminent."
Now this laptop has gone through problems before. I don't know the extents because it's a family laptop and I rarely use it (it's super slow. It used to run Vista but now it runs XP and it's slow regardless). I think the hard drive may have been replaced at one point of another and it has had to be re installed numerous times before. And the way it is used leads me to believe that there is not a lot of space left in that hard drive. So that may have been the issue.
But I want to make sure it is a hardware problem and not something that will happen on the device I eventually decide to install Ubuntu on. How to understand why the hard drive would fail when the live CD doesn't actively use the hard drive, at least not the way it would if it had been installed in the hard drive.
After migrating my dual-boot system (XP & Suse 10.3) to a new hard drive my system boots to XP OK but when it begins the linux boot process it gets stuck looking for the old drive, even though I have rewritten the fstab using the old "/dev/sda5" notation to identify the drive. An error comes up referring to the "/dev/by-id" name for the previous drive, not the new one. For some reason the devices are not rescanned as is evident from the contents of /etc/lvm/.cache and the listing under /dev/by-id. Is there some simple way to force a rescan during the boot process?
i have a netbook compaq mini with a sata toshiba hard drive.XP was installed on this machine until the hard drive started to have bad blocks.Then i bought a mypassport500go to install f14 on it.It worked but know the sata hard drive is more and more faulty.When i try to boot f14 it displays :acpi : package has zero elements. So i cannot boot.I tryed rescuecd, does not work either.i tryed many kernel params to disable sata at boot but it seems to be builtin.there is no option in the bios to disable the hard drive.
after my upgrades i noticed one hard drive was acting funny i was gonna reformat the drive anyway to totally remove winblows from my system grub was installed on the boot sector of the drive that failed how can i get the next drive in line to boot if some one can get me to a howto or tell me what i need to do short there of reinstalling the operating system.
Lately (in the past couple of weeks) my system has been hanging, particularly when I try to watch videos. I'm not sure why this is happening, but when I looked through my system log files I found what's on the attached file. A couple of other programs that I use frequently (xmms2d and epiphany) have similar entries, and I assumed they are related because they are typically running when the slowdowns occur. Also, my /home partition is giving some errors which may or may not be related.
I have minor problem with upgrading a hard drive. I am running an old pentium lll with two hard drives. On the first hard drive I have two partitions of around 90GB each. On the first partition is installed winXP and on the second partition I have Suse 10.3, both booted by grub and living happily side by side. My second hard drive (which is formatted for windows is only 4GB.
My problem arises when I try to replace the 4GB with a 80Gb hard drive. When I disconnect the 4GB drive the system fails to boot up and complains with error 21.
I accidentally deleted the linux mint 8 that was on there due to a small issue discussed on another thread(long story followed by a stupid mistake). after then i reinstalled linux using the .iso i found on the website. all is well. I boot up linux on the external and it runs great. then i turn off the laptop and try to plug it into another laptop( which i used the external hard drive on before and worked) and it went through the bios screen but then after slight lag(5 seconds longer then usual) the blinking cursor in the top left corner would not display anything, anything meaning "booting GRUB" or any other signs of activity. after waiting some time i quit and tried it back on the other laptop, which it was just working on, only to get the same result. I am confused about why it would work the first go around but nothing past that.
The only thing i altered on the external after i installed linux was that i put my home directory into it( from another version of linux mint)
Should the first bootable partition start from sector 1 on a hard disk? or Can it be created anywhere on the disk? I am using fdisk to create the bootable partition.
The situation is I removed the ADSL card from my desktop as I have no use for it for the moment. I am guessing that the motherboard is still trying to detect the Sangoma ADSL card. What is the best way to resolve this problem, uninstall the drivers for the ADSL card or change the settings in the system configuration files?
The system is not affected by this removal, just get prompted regularly about this error as configured in the kerneloops client.
I recently built my second general-purpose server, and recently installed fedora core 10 on it. The first thing I attempted to set up after installation was the network - and that's where it's gone wrong When editing a network device using the graphical system-config-network utility, I find that the subnet mask is being automatically changed to match the default gateway address every time I attempt to modify any of its settings (or sometimes even when I cancel the changes). This also means that I cannot set the subnet mask, as it simply won't accept my setting for it. I seem to be able to get around this glitch by setting the subnet mask using the shell version of the same utility, but that doesn't solve my network issue.
Even when I use the shell utility to fix the subnet mask, I'm unable to ping other computers or routers on the network even when ifconfig indicates that the desired ip address has been taken, and other computers on the network are also unable to see the server. I'm using a wired connection and a static IP address on a network with no DHCP.
Something caused my Fedora 11 system to reboot this evening, only it keeps trying to boot from a CD/DVD. I get to a prompt that says "Boot from CD/DVD" and then it appears just to wait. I can insert my Fedora 11 installation disk and boot from it in rescue mode, and then I can see my entire file system, so I don't think the hard drive has failed. The system just doesn't seem to want to boot from the HD any more. I can get to a command line using the Fedora rescue mode, but I don't know what to do once I'm there.
one additional note. Around a month and a half ago I deleted some files by mistake and wanted to try to recover them. I tried a bunch of approaches that I came across (none worked), and I do remember that one of them had instructions to unmount a portion of the filesystem to protect it from being overwritten before I could recover the files.
Unfortunately, at this point I have no real memory of exactly what I did, but the system has been working fine since then. I would have thought that I had rebooted since then, but it's possible that this is the first time I've rebooted. Could I have unmounted some part of the file system such that it would still by unmounted even when rebooting? How can I check this from the command line I get in rescue mode? (My file system gets mounted under /mnt/sysimage/)
Debian 5.0. Lately after login following warning popup;Your system had a kernel failure
There is diagnostic information availiable for this failure. Do you want to submit this infomation to the www.kerneloops.org
-> Yes
$ uname -aLinux vm0.debian50 2.6.26-2-686 #1 SMP Wed May 12 21:56:10 UTC 2010 i686 GNU/Linux
Reboot to old kernel 2.6.26-1 the said warning doesn't popup. Reboot again to kernel 2.6.26-2 and after login no kernel failure warning popup. I did it twice. IIRC I encountered this problem before.
I've been dual booting Lenny and Squeeze but after replacing Lenny with a fresh Squeeze using ext4, the video display has been strange. The effect is similar to running a live CD, where a click does nothing for a few seconds while the CD winds up and gets to the application, but slower than that. Sometimes the display has patches of several windows all mixed up, zig zag patterns like a TV that is too far from a transmitter to receive a good signal and sometimes the mouse freezes in moving around. When I boot and don't start X, everything works perfectly, no delays, no messed up windows.
My video is ATI x1300 with Radeon driver. What is the best way to get the system to use only vesa, to see if that works, instead of ati or radeon? is possible to use grub.cfg or /etc/defaults/grub or /etc/grub.d/ ? I couldn't find any reports of problems with Xorg used by Squeeze, so it seems to be the ATi driver or the radeon driver.
I've installed Fedora 10 short time after it came out. Now I am having some problems unmounting thes drives on restart or shutdown. It hangs at the stage of 'unmounting file system'. I've looked into this matter and discovered that those drives are automatically mounted and shown on the Gnome file browser. As the /etc/fstab indicates, it is not mounted by it. I must have done something to have all the hard drives shown in the file browser and now Fedora seems to be unable to unmount them.
Quote:
# # /etc/fstab # Created by anaconda on Mon Sep 7 20:25:11 2009 # # Accessible filesystems, by reference, are maintained under '/dev/disk'
This probably isn't the best way to go about this, but I am pretty nooby. I took the hard drive with Ubuntu install and made it the second SATA drive, and then put a new SATA drive in as the first and installed Fedora on it.Now I want to access my files from the Ubuntu drive and put them on the new drive but when I try to access it, I can look at some files but the majority of them (like my music and a lot of my documents) it says that I don't have permission.Is there some way I can get to these files? I tried searching but I couldn't find anything relevant
My external disk does not appear as mounted on the desktop (It's e-Sata and NTFS, samsung 1.36 Tera bytes ) There's nothing in /media, nor it appears on the desktop as mounted. What can i do to be able to use it?
I've currently got 9.10 and have (somehow) managed to mess the system up already!It's a new computer so I'm not fussed about data loss etc, but is there a way to completely reset the system which will also format the hard drive (as it was a download that has messed it up!) without losing the O/S?
I have a 1.5TB Western Digital Caviar Green in a USB 2.0 external setup with an ext4 file system. I'm going to purchase a 2.0TB Western Digital Caviar Green in a USB 2.0 external case, copy the data over and put my 1.5TB in a fire-resistant box in another house. I'm worried about a couple things however:
(1) I'm worried about the long-term viability of _any_ file system years into the future. I've been storing my data on hard drives (instead of CDs, DVDs or BDs) for years now due to their higher reliability than optical disks. However, the file system used in optical disks is UDF which I think has much longer viability into the future. I'm not going to store terabytes of data on optical discs of course, so I'm wondering what I should choose for a hard drive file system. FAT32 or NTFS (due to Windows' 90%+ presence on the desktop, including still being used by Windows 7) may be the best choice, but I much rather have a open source file system, especially one that allows for permissions, timestamps, etc.
(2) As for my 2TB hard drive that I will be using for a while into the future, should I continue to use ext4 (I've had no problem with it thus far), but is there another file system that has better performance when storing and transferring gigs of data?
