Hardware :: External Hard Drive Failure / Not Displaying "booting GRUB" Or Any Other Signs Of Activity?
Jan 6, 2010
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)
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Dec 20, 2010
dual boot ubuntu / windows on seperate drives ubuntu drive fails today and now boots saying cannot find device (id) grub rescue>
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Aug 12, 2010
would putting ubuntu on an external hard drive and booting it from refit work? and would i was starting up my imac 11,2 my ipod was bootable for some reason?
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Jun 19, 2011
I have windows on my box, I have fedora 14 on my external that goes through my usb. Grub is installed on my usb. Since the only thing stored on my external was fedora i really didn't have to do much to it. just go into bios and boot from usb. Now that im using fedora more, Id like to add Vista to my choices. I guess the numbers change once your using an external drive. Ive read some of the problems like mine but they didn't quite do it. Im going to inclose 2 screen shots of my drives/partitions and my grub.conf.
# grub.conf generated by anaconda
# Note that you do not have to rerun grub after making changes to this file
# NOTICE: You have a /boot partition. This means that
[code]....
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Jan 15, 2009
I installed a new hard drive to my system. I use a program called R-Drive image to copy all my os to my new drive. It done a pretty good job too, its an exact copy. I deleted the old one. But obviously now I cant boot. I had a look at the menu.lst file i dont know what to change it to. heres my drive setup,
C: - Windows Vista - Ubuntu
D: - Documents - Swap File
E: - Games
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Jan 14, 2009
I have 2 ubuntu's: 1 on my ineternal hard drive, 1 on my external
When I startup without my ext drive =>GRUB error 21.
And when I plug it in I can choose: the standard ubuntu kernel is the one on my external, and the original one is listed under other...
I'd like to be able to startup without external hard drive and make the ubuntu on my internal drve the standard.
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May 25, 2010
I have Ubuntu/Vista dual boot desktop with Single HDD (200GB) that i cloned to an external USB HDD (320GB) using clonezilla. My intention is to use the external HDD as a backup to up running in case my 3 year old desktop HDD fails. To make sure the clone is good to use if need, i connected external HDD to USB port and tried boot from it but got "Error 18". I tried to Google got some infoDid a fdisk -lu and got the following.
Code:
Disk /dev/sda: 200.0 GB, 200049647616 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 24321 cylinders, total 390721968 sectors
[code]....
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Feb 8, 2010
I've tried to be clever but as usual I didn't think before acting and missed a small detail.
I have recently installed karmic (dual booting with Vista) on my dell xps laptop. The install went fine, I'm very happy with my new OS.
I bought a new Seagate 500GB portable external HDD. I got a bit over-excited and installed karmic on the external drive. This worked fine and I got a lovely (but slow to appear) Grub2 menu showing my vista and both ubuntu options.
My problem is that now, when I unplug the external drive, Grub fails and I get a grub rescue> prompt. So I need the external drive to be plugged in if I want to boot.
It seems I have done something to the grub configuration. I have read around the subject but I am not confident about how best to proceed.
I understand there is an 'advanced' option in the installer which will allow me to choose where to install grub. Presumably I want it on the internal drive so that I can boot without the external one plugged in.
Am I right in thinking I can just pop in my install disk and redo the installation?
If I indicate I want to install Grub on the internal drive, which partition should I aim for?
Will I get a grub option for booting to the external drive?
Will I be able to plug the external drive into a different machine and boot from it?
I haven't done anything with the fresh install on the external drive so I don't mind losing that.
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Jan 11, 2011
It started when I wanted to dual boot Windows 7 and Opensuse off of my netbook (No DVD/CD drive) I tried install suse from an external hard drive and I botched it. I ended up erasing EVERYTHING off of my internal netbook hard drive. Windows and all.
Well, I had a couple of other computers so I studied up and eventually successfully installed OpenSUSE 11.2 on my external hard drive (11.3 being the one that I accidentally erased everything with, so kinda scared of it) and now I want to install openSUSE 11.2 on my internal netbook hard drive.
I can not use disks
I can not use a flash drive (For some reason, even if I make it bootable, it will not load up, this could be because it's actually a 8GB microSD card that is placed in a USB card reader.)
I can not use an external hard drive because that's what I'm running suse off of.
I've tried reading up on how to install suse on another drive off of the hard drive and I've gotten as far as whenever I boot up the netbook with the suse external hard drive connected it will ask to boot into OpenSUSE, the Fail Safe, or to install OpenSuse. When I select to install it it gives me the Error 18 Unknown File system.
I've tried formatting the internal hard drive twice. One as NTFS and again as EXT4. Neither seems to effect it other than when it's ext4 I can open it and it contains a Lost and Found folder.
When I interrupt the boot sequence by pressing c and going to the terminal and I use the root (hd +TAB command it tells me I have a hd0 and a hd1. The hd1 only has 1 partition which is ext4, which I'm assuming hd1 is the internal hard drive (I'm not sure how to check) and the hd0 is the external hard drive, which has three partitions. One with an unknown file system and two with ext4. When I try to enter the set up from the terminal it gives me the same error for any thing I put it (e.g. root (hd0,0) gives the same error as root (hd0,1), or root (hd0,2) and root (hd1,0)
Something like it cannot locate these two files I'm assuming it needs to boot. If anyone finds this relevant I'll retry it and post the files its missing.
I've been searching for awhile and can't find any threads that can solve my problem. From other threads, however, I have noticed that I should probably include my menu.lst, listed below
Code:
I have also ran the boot info script and received the RESULTS.txt file it generates. Listed below
Code:
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Feb 12, 2011
Whenever I'm copying something big, or installing a large update, or doing something else that takes a lot from the hard drive, my entire system slows down. Now, I realize that this is inevitable due to limited resources, but the heavy hard drive work is usually low-priority, background stuff.
Is it possible to assign hard drive activity a low priority value, similar to renicing processes on the CPU?
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Jan 25, 2010
I got a dell inspiron 1501 laptop with a 80Gb sata drive what is the best solution to add data storage space for someone that love to have multiples operating systems at hand Note: I use mostly linux so I won't need to change my laptop for many years maybe ...
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Jul 10, 2009
I've been running Debian Lenny kernel 2.6.26 w/ desktop kde3.5 on my laptop for a while, and im going to take a trip in which i will be unable to take wmy laptop with me. However, where i am going contains computers and i figured if i could install debian onto my external harddrive, i could just boot onto the other computers. I install it using the debianlenny-i386 dvd image. However whenever I try to boot it from a computer. Grub returns
Code:
Grub Loading...
Error 21
and then the blinkng cursor. On one site i found something saying "you may need to activat the drive" and some command-line instructions on how to do it. However the commands have faded from memory and i am now unable to find that site again. Could anyone offer insight on how to fix this "grub error 21" or how to activate it. I run primarily debian but i have a windows partition on one of my relative's computers.
Thank you in advance for the help!!!
btw I'm installing on a western digital 500gb "passport" external hard drive with ext3 and swap partitions.
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Jun 3, 2011
I have a laptop with only 30GB storage and I want to install Lubuntu in virtual box but Lubuntu needs 5GB of storage space which i dont have. Could i use an external 160GB hard drive to act as the hard drive for the virtual machine without affecting the files that are already on the external hard drive
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Jan 17, 2011
I recently bought 320 GB Trancend external hard disk and working fine days back.Earlier i could copy from and to the hard disk with out any issue. I dont know what happened after that now i am not able to write any files in to the external hard disk. This is not NTFS formatted device. here is some of the out put from terminal.
Code:
sundar@sundar-sundar:~$ fdisk -l
Disk /dev/sda: 120.0 GB, 120034123776 bytes
[code]...
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Feb 11, 2010
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?
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May 26, 2010
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?
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May 30, 2011
I have 350GB external Western Digital USB hard Drive.When I try to remove it from the system by executing Safely Remove Drive menu the fedora 15 system gets stuck.The processor starts giving a hum sound and it goes on even if it is left for half an hour in the stuck state.The Mouse is not working and everything is halted.
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Jun 19, 2011
I would like to install Linux Ubuntu 11.04 on an external hard drive - its partitioned and ready for Linux.I've downloaded and burnt the .iso file to a DVD so its all good so far...First of all... is this possible without messing up my macbook? I don't particularly want to break into my macbook to disconnect the hard drive (I read on a tutorial for a previous version of Ubuntu that I'd have to do that... - does it still apply to 11.04?) - as it voids the warranty (I checked ).The reason I ask this is because I had a friend who partitioned their internal hard drive and installed Ubuntu on it. But after installation was complete they couldn't boot up Windows 7 or Ubuntu... and it resulted in them having to clean install Windows 7... - I don't want to end up in that situation
Second... If it is possible to install it without messing up my macbook... - Do I just follow the install instructions but just make sure that where possible I make sure that everything is installed on my external hard drive?...I really need someone to put my mind at rest that everything will run smoothly and that I'll be able to run Mac OS X as usual but also that I'll be able to boot from my external hard drive to run Ubuntu.
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Mar 30, 2011
i have installed fedora 14 with so many libraries ,development tools installed on my pc but i usually have to present some projects which can run on my system .........and can't be executed or compiled due to absence of libraries and tools there so, i there some way to so that i can use this current installation on my hard drive of my pc to some external media like external hard disk and plug and use that installation anywhere on any system..
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Oct 3, 2010
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.
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Sep 16, 2010
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?
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May 22, 2010
I initially thought the problem had to do with the Lucid Lynx upgrade, a lot of people have been reporting similar issues with drive mapping and things along those line. My issue is that an external drive, formatted in FAT32 appears to be corrupted, and overtime begins to read or mounts as 'read-only.'
What I've read, and deduced, is that this is ultimately and issue with the drive. I've backed it up, reformatted, and been able to write to the drive successfully, but I've been moving a lot of files (backing up) and the system has been reporting input/output errors in transferring some files (through the GUI).
The only thing I can think of, is that the device itself is corrupted or damaged, and that I need to be thinking of other back-up options for the future. Any suggestions on disk-doctoring? I'm hoping to do a clean-install of the OS once I back up my files manually.
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Dec 27, 2010
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.
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Jan 21, 2010
I was given an external USB drive which has Windows XP Pro on the first partition. I can mount and access the partition with no problem. When I run update-grub, it finds the XP partition and creates a menu entry for it. But when I select it from the Grub menu, I get an error that the device is not found.
Results of sudo fdisk -l
Code:
Disk /dev/sda: 40.0 GB, 40020664320 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 4865 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00086c27
[Code]....
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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.
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Jan 29, 2011
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?
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Feb 15, 2011
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.
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Sep 14, 2014
Debian not booting from USB external SSD drive. Linux 3.2.0-4-686-pae been installed on new SSD, attached to Windows 7 laptop. When I select "USB storage" in Windows boot order menu and try to boot, Linux not booting, every time loading Windows. Is it ever possible to boot linux with such setup?
[URL] .....
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Apr 5, 2010
installed Ubuntu 9.10 in an internal SATA drive and used it for quite a while, but yesterday my laptop's graphics card decided to die, and it looks like it will be a full month until I get replacement m/b. Therefore, I bought an external USB SATA Hub for my laptop's drive, but I can't seem to be able to boot ubuntu from this drive. I'm trying to boot with this external usb hub attached to an old P4 machine with USB booting enabled.I get till the grub screen, but as soon as the message "Grub loading" appears, I get a message saying:error: no such partitionand I get a prompt as follows:grub-rescue>I guess grub is trying to boot to a different device name... It's weird, I thought Ubuntu should boot irregardless of which interface I use, be it SATA or USB.
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Mar 26, 2011
I am building a home server that will host a multitude of files; from mp3s to ebooks to FEA software and files. I don't know if RAID is the right thing for me. This server will have all the files that I have accumulated over the years and if the drive fails than I will be S.O.L. I have seen discussions where someone has RAID 1 setup but they don't have their drives internally (to the case), they bought 2 separate external hard drives with eSata to minimize an electrical failure to the drives. (I guess this is a good idea)I have also read about having one drive then using a second to rsync data every week. I planned on purchasing 2 enterprise hard drives of 500 MB to 1 GB but I don't have any experience with how I should handle my data
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