Hardware :: Squeezing More Life Out Of A Failing Hard Drive?
Jun 3, 2010
I'm using xubuntu on a box that has 2 drives. One is quite small mounted as / and the other larger drive is mounted as /home Both drives are IDE The /home drive has had some failure in the past & occasionally creates errors. Is there any way of identify which sectors are bad (or good) and isolating them to try & get some more use out of the drive?
It won't be used for storing valuable data.It is an old box for visitors to use. But it would be handy to use it to store some large read-only audio files. I've installed smartctl & could post output from there if you think it is useful. I can't work out how to interpret the information.
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Aug 30, 2010
I am wanting to replace the hard drive on my laptop with a Compact Flash Card. I bought a card and a adapter, but I am seeing that there are a lot of downsides to this (e.g. the card is slower, writes should be conserved because of limited write cycles, etc..) plus, in order to change the hard drive in my laptop (ibook g3 clamshell) you literally have to disassemble the entire thing! I mainly wanted to do this project to increase my battery life. However, some people say that it doesn't make much of a difference, while others say it is wonderful. So, to those that have done this mod, how much of a difference did it make for you?
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Jul 3, 2010
In my laptop I have a 200GB hard drive that is starting to make clicking and grinding noises and won't boot about every third try.
Code:
root@Frank2:/home/bruce# fdisk -l
Disk /dev/sda: 200.0 GB, 200049647616 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 24321 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
[Code]...
/dev/sdb is a usb flash drive that has pmagic (not sure of the version, but it's 2.6.32.9-pmagic kernel, so I think it's the latest version). I'm posting from pmagic right now because I don't want the failing disk to get any worse until I get this sorted. I also know there is a post here called something like 'learning the dd command' or 'mastering the dd command' or something to that effect, but I can't find it for the life of me (I have it bookmarked on the failing drive, of course). If someone could point me to that post,
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Jun 26, 2010
Using F12 with a LVM Volume, Single disk with OS on and boot partition. The OS HDD is getting i/o errors, but will still boot to the login screen. I've removed the HDD and connected it to a Fedora Live OS on my laptop, connected the HDD and it registers as :
[root@localhost]# fdisk -l /dev/sdd
Disk /dev/sdd: 250.1 GB, 250059350016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 30401 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x000e0069
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdd1 * 1 26 204800 83 Linux
Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/sdd2 26 30401 243991201 8e Linux LVM
And it tried to mount /dev/sdd2 to view and see if I can recover some files.
[root@localhost]# mount /dev/sdd2 /mnt -t ext4[root@localhost james]# mount /dev/sdd2 /mnt -t ext4
mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sdd2,
missing codepage or helper program, or other error
In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try
dmesg | tail or so
Any way to mount the partition to allow me to try and get some data back, or if trying to do a full backup of the drive you can get it to ignore i/o errors.
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Jun 8, 2011
I have a 3 weeks old PC which I've just finished getting set up with Ubuntu 11.04 and W7 in a Virtual Box. Now the drive has started making rumbling noises and doesn't always boot.The engineer from Dell is coming tomorrow to replace the drive, but what can I do about transferring the whole old drive to the new one in full working order, quickly?
I've been using rsync to keep backups of my home folder, so I've got the data side covered. But I don't really want to spend the next couple of weeks re-installing all the software, printers etc all over again. So is there a quick, easy way of replicating the old drive with partitions, VB, etc (I'm not that good at using the terminal) ?
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Jan 5, 2010
I made an attempt to backup my system (karmic koala) using this routine. cd / then sudo tar cvpzf backup.tgz --exclude=/proc --exclude=/lost+found --exclude=/backup.tgz --exclude=/mnt --exclude=/sys /
The process of backup went on for a very long time, which is probably normal. On returning to the computer in the morning, it was in suspend mode and would not power on via the usual method,tapping power button. So then I used the reset button, and after booting up a message appears on the top right that reports "Install problem! The configuration defaults for GNOME Power Manager have not been installed correctly. Please contact your computer administrator."
Is there something wrong with the statement that was used for backing up the system? Also when I attempt to login it does not work now either, it eventually returns to the login user selection. So is there a possibility the backup finished and then there may be a chance the system can be restored from the backup file? I have tried booting up with a live cd and could use some advice on how to navigate with terminal to root of the system and see if the backup file exist even, have been unable to get to the root folder(where the backup would be) with the GUI method via live cd.
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Aug 3, 2009
I seem to have a complex issue on my hands that i can't figure out. first, i wasn't able to get access to my LVM'd hard drives via SSH without half of the content being missing or locked out (read-only or unable to open at all). the problem then went up to being unable to boot up - all i got was a long slew of [100.1234] ata1.00: error messages (they eventually DO stop once they get to around 998.234234 or whatever, and then i can log in and it seems to be "stable").
Part way through this rebooting ordeal i realized / decided to make power-on-self-test stop and wait if it finds errors (via bios) - that showed me that my 750G SATA drive is "bad" and my two (older) 120G & 250G IDE drives are "ok". i then unplugged the SATA drive, rebooted, and didn't see those error messages. however, my LVM was still obviously not coming together (since LVM was made up of the 120G, 250G, and 750G drives)
So, now it seems:
a) I can't boot smoothly with all drives in place
b) I can't do anything with lvm if i remove the 750G sata
c) With all drives hooked up, i can wait 10mins for the errors to go away, but STILL can't do anything with lvm
d) I need to recover the lvm stuff so that i can nicely migrate ALL those files (1.1TB of it) onto a new 1.5TB drive and do away with lvm
This is all running ubuntu 7.10 server edition (32-bit version on a 64-bit computer). i DID post a question on the ubuntu forum as well but so far got no replies at all.
Here's a few pics of the booting process, with one or two "fail" lines showing.
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Mar 11, 2011
Does HDD Life get affected due to repeated partitioning and formatting ..I guess most of the partitioning programs (Gparted , fdisk etc) do only a quick format and not a Low Level format...
So theoretically by formatting it means only deleting right?
Other than the data loss , there is no need to worry abt wear and tear of the HDD (physical wear and tear due to repeated writing of the Head on the device which leads to Bad Blocks)
I am formatting and trying different distros left,right and centre almost 2 times in a week as I got a spare computer and I have installed a new HDD !
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Oct 16, 2010
still would like to see some actual LAB DATA - but the info here is satisfactory as a "general rule of thumb". I was wondering if I put files on a USB flash drive & left it sit on the shelf, how long it would be before those files would start to deteriorate? - This would have nothing to do with the read/write cycle as in the "shelf time" it wouldn't be used.
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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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Mar 16, 2010
My parents bought a new hard drive for a laptop that I've owned for several years. It's much larger than the current one, so I plan on splitting it up to dual boot it with Ubuntu.I have no problem with partitioning a drive (I always keep a LiveCD handy), but my question is this: how can I go about moving the existing partition to the new drive? This is a laptop, so I can't simply plug the new drive into another slot.
Also, even if I manage to move it, will Windows still work on the new drive in a larger partition? I've had this laptop for quite a while, and I've lost the recovery discs that came with it a long time ago. I also have a lot of software without CDs to reinstall them with. This makes not reinstalling Windows a high priority.
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Feb 23, 2011
I own a 2007 model alu' 24" iMac. I recently upgraded the RAM. Whilst researching the topic on the web I discovered this very valuable web page: [URL] I did as it said & now have 6GB of RAM in my very happy iMac. The machine is functioning perfectly just as the site said it would.
[edit:] Just a quick note to let you know that after two weeks of the usual long days & some times 24hr days, the machine has been running faultlessly.
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May 1, 2010
Trying to install Fedora 12 using the 6 CDs. Trying to install on an older x86 box.Problem is that when detecting my hard drive, Fedora 12 recognizes it as a sda hard drive instead of hda hard drive. I have no SCSI connected to my computer what so ever. It's an old fashion PATA Western Digital hard drive.If I proceed with the install, Fedora 12 only installs 200MB of the OS from the first CD only. No options for additional software or anything.
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Mar 21, 2009
Sometimes when I do anything write heavy such as transferring backup or downloading large files from the net, the machine crashes almost completely.
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Jan 18, 2011
How to diagnose a possibly failing harddisk. This is the system disk of a Windows XP machine that will not boot. It gets to the "progress bar" that runs across the screen a few times but then it always stops in the same spot. If I boot from a live Ubuntu CD what tools should I use to find out if the disk itself is failing? The disk is under warranty but if I take it to the shop and the problem turns out to be software errors then I have to pay so I want to be sure what is going on before going there..
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Mar 14, 2010
Last week, i updated, my fedora. After that, during every boot up, I am getting a warning message like " Your hard disk may failing". It indicates that it is due to bad sectors. But I don't think so. There was a bug reported for a similar problem in fedora 11. I think it is not fixed yet. Hard disk is not having any problem during data access. Other OS including windows are not giving any warning message.
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Apr 10, 2010
I ran smartctl and it says "unrecognized" hard drive. I recognized the hard drive the first time I ran the test. But now, it's unrecognized? How come? I don't know how or why this happens. How can I get rid of this problem and the annoying icon?
I tried to run Windows, then started getting errors? This is strange: I've been running Linux the whole day. I last used the Windows hard drive was 2 days ago. Now its screwing up. Window is screwing up the hard drive? HDD has too many bad sectors. didn't touch it, I didn't do much on it, etc? I do not understand?!
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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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Nov 28, 2010
extract some data off a failing drive the other day. I plugged it in, but got no response in windows or linux (partition is ntfs), but it does appear in the bios and /dev (though the hdd hung most linux liveCDs except rescue remix 9.04). I tried to analyze the drive, and found good smart data, so I figured there were just a few bad blocks in critical places. I ran spinrite against it in level 2 mode. the process crawled (40MB after 2 hours) and it updated the smart data to reflect many many reallocated sectors, putting the drive into a failing state as far as smart is concerned. so, now, in a last ditch effort I am turning to ddrescue to try to get an image of the drive. it's been running about 17 hours now, and has done several complete passes through "Splitting error areas".
here is my current output:
Code:
Disk /dev/sdb: 320.0 GB, 320072933376 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 38913 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
[code]....
have I done all I can? can I in good conscious declare this a lost cause? I do have an image from a prior run of ddrescue, with 826 MB of data.
edit: I resumed the task from log, and now it is reporting the err size as 9223 PB. since the drive is a 320GB, I find that a bit odd.
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Apr 11, 2011
I have a 2 Tb drive that Linux is saying is failing, the reason for this is Relocated Secotor Count, should i really worry and why is it happening to such a new drive its only 4 months old I received it on December 30th I woudl think it would not be bad at this point.
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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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Feb 14, 2011
I've got an LG CD/DVD player/writer in my desktop, and it's suddenly stopped working. No error messages at all, but it doesn't acknowledge any discs any more, whether they're CDs or DVDs or CDRWs or anything. How can I diagnose what's wrong? It's only 1.5 years old so I wouldn't expect it to be a hardware problem really, but I can't think of anything else. At first I thought I'd broken something with Squeeze, but I ran a live system from USB stick and it also can't read any discs at all. Also I tried a bootable DVD and couldn't get that to boot either, so I'm pretty confident it's not a software problem. It's always worked fine before and hasn't had any shocks or moves or anything (that I know of). The green light flashes when I close the drawer, just flashes a few times and then stops. There's nothing in /var/log/messages. Are there any tricks to figure out what might be wrong or is it looking like I need to buy a replacement drive?
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Dec 29, 2010
An external 3½" HDD seems to be in danger of failing” it's making ticking sounds when idle. I've acquired a replacement drive, and want to know the best strategy to get the data off of the dubious drive with the best chance of saving as much as possible. There are some directories that are more important than others. However, I'm guessing that picking and choosing directories is going to reduce my chances of saving the whole thing. I would also have to mount it, dump a file listing, and then unmount it in order to be able to effectively prioritize directories. Adding in the fact that it's time-consuming to do this, I'm leaning away from this approach.
I've considered just using dd, but I'm not sure how it would handle read errors or other problems that might prevent only certain parts of the data from being rescued, or which could be overcome with some retries, but not so many that they endanger other parts of the drive from being saved. I guess ideally it would do a single pass to get as much as possible and then go back to retry anything that was missed due to errors.
Is it possible that copying more slowly — e.g. pausing every x MB/GB — would be better than just running the operation full tilt, for example to avoid any overheating issues? For the "where is your backup" crowd: this actually is my backup drive, but it also contains some non-critical and bulky stuff, like music, that aren't backups, i.e. aren't backed up. The drive has not exhibited any clear signs of failure other than this somewhat ominous sound. I did have to fsck a few errors recently — orphaned inodes, incorrect free blocks/inodes counts, inode bitmap differences, zero dtime on deleted inodes; about 20 errors in all.The filesystem of the partition is ext3.
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Jan 26, 2010
I have 4 1.5 TB Seagate drives configured in RAID 5 via mdadm on Karmic. It seems that after a while, one drive always drops out of the array. It's a brand new drive, and after a reboot, it will come back in and rebuild just fine, so somehow I doubt the drive is actually failing. Here's a dmesg snip. The mounting that happens at the top is the mounting of the array, and as you can see, after a while, there is some kind of write failure.
[70178.385356] EXT3 FS on md0, internal journal
[70178.385373] EXT3-fs: mounted filesystem with writeback data mode.
[95234.954141] ata5.00: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x0 action 0x6 frozen
[95234.954160] ata5.00: cmd ea/00:00:00:00:00/00:00:00:00:00/a0 tag 0
[95234.954162] res 40/00:00:c6:66:a8/00:00:ae:00:00/e0 Emask 0x4 (timeout)
[95234.954168] ata5.00: status: { DRDY }
[Code]...
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Sep 14, 2010
I have 2 500gb drives in my system. One of the drives I use for swap and home is failing, good thing it is under warranty... Bad thing I have to remove the drive from my system.
I have / on the first drive taking it all up. On the drive that needs replaced I have /swap and /home taking up the whole drive.
Is there a way to shrink /dev/sda to put swap and home on that drive and to move it back when new drive arrives? Or would it be simpler to just re-install to one drive?
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Dec 20, 2010
I have an external HD attached to my desktop and setup as a shared resource. I want to be able to access it from my laptop as well. After much trying and drinking, I ended up with this in fstab:
//crackbox/seagate /seagate -o
then began giving me an error about not recognizing the file system type. I've been reading everything I can find and trying to get it to work, and have come up with very little. My fstab now contains this line instead of the above:
[code]...
Now, when I reload fstab with "sudo mount -a", I get this output:
[code]...
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May 19, 2010
I have an external drive that has been formatted as NTFS and I need to recover the files. For the most part, on windows, I can read the drive however When I'm copying, it interrupts with an I/O failure. Is there a way to copy the files from Linux and have it continue even if it has an error?
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Sep 22, 2010
i have a Sandisk 5gig USB key that had mint 9 live on it that i was hoping to get an old brotasaurus (Dell Latitude D510) up and running again with. apparently Mint is too pretty for the beast and so I tried to get mint Fluxbox to install on to the key, then i tried Fedora, and finaly i tried DSL. Unetbootin seems to have stoped making the key bootable as three of my laps seem unable to read it.
[Update] so i tried dd'ing the iso to the usb following the instructions on the suse site
# umount /dev/sdb1
# dd if=/home/Derf/Downloads/dsl-4.4.10.iso of=/dev/sdb1 bs=4M;sync
and it is still failing to create a bootable usb. says
missing operating system
intel UNDI, PXE-2.1(build 082)
copyright (C) 1997-2000 Intel Corporation
For Realtek RTL8101E/8102E PCI-E Ethernet Controller v1.08 (080408)
PXE-E61: Media test failure, check cable
PXE-M0F: Exiting PXE ROM
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Feb 11, 2010
I am running Live 12 on my CD rom drive of my dying laptop. I have a major Windows registry error on that system and am working to recover my files. I have successfully moved a couple of folders from the laptop to my Seagate Free Agent Drive as a test.What I would like to know is, is there a way to copy my files and folders without literally dragging and dropping each one? We're talking 140 G of folders....sigh.
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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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