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..
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?
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.
I am on F15 32-bit with GNOME 3. I keep getting "A Hard Disk Is Failing" warnings from the Disk Utility, very frequently. Is this a serious issue? Because I knew this to be a bug in Palimpsest DU back in F13/14. Also how can I disable any notifications from this application?
after installing Ubuntu on one WD 500 GB hard disk and after making mistake and pasting wrong code into Terminal:my OTHER WD 500 GB hard disk that was also in the system (I guess it was "hd1") - died.The problem must be, I guess, I typed wrong code: "hd1,1" instead of "hd0,0".)500 GB (NTFS) of data was on that other (non-Ubuntu) hard disk, and now I can not access it anymore. While booting, system gives "Hard Disk Error" warning and stops.One again: I installed Ubuntu od one hard disk and at the end of instalation I pasted wrong code for GRUB, giving address of another hard disk. Now that other hard disk has error and will not work
I have a sata 320 gb with mandriva linux 2009.1 on it.And it is what curently atached to my cpu. It is shown as 'sda' in the partition table.I also have another 40gb hard disk with windows xp installed on it.It is shown as 'hda' in the partition table . Now what i want to do is attach this 40gb hard disk to my pc and configure grub on my 320gb hard disk('sda') so as to boot windows xp(which is residing on the second hard disk,'hda')Can anyone tell me if what im doing is feasible or not? If it is feasible,can anyone suggest me how to get it working. I know i just need to add 2-3 lines to my grub.conf, but dont know what exactly i need to write.
I had a dual boot (windows 7 + debian), both of them installed in my internal hard disk, with the GRUB in it. I have recently installed a second linux distro (mint), but I put it in an external hard disk. Now the GRUB allows me to boot any of the three operating systems, but I need the external disk to do it. It seems that after the mint installation the GRUB is now working from the external disk (if the external disk is not connected, the machine does not boot.) �Is there a way to change the location of the GRUB, to the internal hard disk of my laptop?
I was using Terminal and browsing a directory in my home folder. My "home" directory is located on "/dev/sdb1". When in Terminal I typed "ls" in one of my directories and the output was garbage. The output didn't show the files in the directory. I think it said something like, "input/output error". Unfortunately, I didn't write the exact error down. Instead I rebooted.The hard disk with the problem is:
Code: $ sudo hdparm -I /dev/sdb [sudo] password for brian:
My boot disk is failing! I am a little nervous, so I'd like to have extra eyes on this so that I don't fubar it.
My setup is as follows, with WinXP and Ubuntu living on completely separate drives:
The boot disk (WinXP with grub2 on MBR) is failing. I need to replace it, pronto.
Do I need to get any data from the MBR on the failing disk before removing it?
Should I make the Karmic disk bootable and install grub on it before removing the failing boot disk?
Once I have Windows (re)installed on a new disc (which will still be /dev/sda) I want to install GRUB2 to its MBR and re-instate the old (current) boot options. How should I do this?
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.
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.
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?!
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,
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.
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) ?
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.
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
I have two internal harddisk. Harddisk 1 has ubuntu, fedora installed and harddisk 2 has ubuntu installed. I normally connect either one, and use it. How can i always keep connect both harddisks, and at the start, select from which harddisk to boot? Or it's not possible?
ran out of space in my /home dir. Have a second hard drive to install and would like to designate it as additional space for /home. I do not want to mount it as a dir inside my home I would like it to simply work as though my /home simply has more space available to it.
is there a way to write/unpack .qcow2 hard disk image directly to real hard drive in Linux?(I know it's possible to unpack .qcow2 to .raw and then dd to drive, but I'd like to skip .raw since its large)
I created a thread about a problem a I had with my hard disk clicking whilst idle little while ago and I may now have stumbled upon a possible solution. The strange thing with the problem is that Ubuntu/Kubuntu didn't cause this problem but Opensuse 11.2 does.
I installed Fedora 13 to have a glimpse of what all the fuss was about and noticed that I had the same problem (hard disk clicking whilst idle ~ every 20 secs or so). Now there's a wiki on this subject and a few bug reports: [url]
Problem Description
Some ATA harddrives perform very frequent head unloads under Linux significantly shortening their lifespans. Root cause
The inactivity timer for head unload is configured too aggressively either via ATA APM (Advanced Power Management) feature or other non-standard means. Such aggressive settings are very fragile to changes in IO pattern and under Linux many such drives unload their heads only to re-load them shortly. Note that this relentless unloading/reloading cycle can also be triggered under Windows by installing programs which can alter the IO pattern (e.g. certain vaccine programs which runs in background).
Now two of the listed models with this problem are basically identical to my model (Dell Inspiron 1520) and basically share the same hardware: Dell Vostro 1500 and XPS 1520.
The workaround listed is to:
set APM to 254
Furthermore, there is a script: Storage-Fixup which can also be downloaded from opensuse software search. Indeed there is a report of this for a Vostro 1500: Gmane Loom
The report suggests looking at: Disk Power Management - openSUSE which lists a method to create a configuration file to management disk power management:
My question is whether I could download the storage-fixup rpm [url] has a description of it and it can be found: Software.openSUSE.org) and install it to (hopefully) solve the issue or should I follow the method given in: Disk Power Management - openSUSE
I'm trying to resize a partition on an IDE hard disk to use the entire disk but can not get more than a 309GB partition. I can get 295, 300, 301, 302GB, etc... fine but start getting problems with anything over 309GB. I get the following error with 310GB or more:
error: block relocator should have relocated 533 Warning: You should reinstall your boot loader before rebooting. Read section 4 of the Parted User documentation for more information. I am using Slackware 12.1, GNU parted 1.8.8, ext2 filesystem.
When trying to run MS Communicator 2007 in XP hosted by Ubuntu 9.10 using VirtualBox 3.1.6, the Communicator process inside the virtual image maxes out (90%+) and it becomes unusable (host reports VBox at 50% CPU). If I migrate that image to a Windows host, VBox does not show the same issue (Communicator process ranges from 20-35%). Creating a similar VMware image on the Ubuntu host and running it also does not show the issue (Communicator process ranges from 20-35%). So obviously there is some kind of bottleneck occurring with VBox on Ubuntu. My questions is, how do I figure out what that bottleneck is?
The problem is random but reproducible: go to http://www.tvbythenumbers.com/, navigate around for a while, click some links...eventually firefox (3.6.3 on 10.04) will crash. I tried running firefox from the command line, but all it says is 'Segmentation fault' with no details. What can I do to diagnose this?
