Hard drive repair

witnessmenow

Hey all,

My brothers laptop isnt booting into ubuntu anymore, its getting stuck at checking the hard the hard drive. I've scanned it with some tools on Ultimate Boot CD and its said there is damaged sectors but they havent fixed them.

I've had success with Hirens boot disc repairing hard drives like this before, but none of the tools can load the cd rom drivers.

So can anyone else recomend any tools to do it?

Cheers

An Fear Aniar

Hi,

at what stage does it get stuck? Do you get a Grub Error?


.

witnessmenow

No grub loads fine,

Im away form it now so im not 100% where it is but im pretty sure its checking the hard drive after its been mounted an unmounted 20 times without being checked, that stage.

Edit: and BTW there is absolutely nothing that i need to save from the hard drive, its completely empty

conceited

Scandisk from windows.

lynchie

conceited wrote: »

Scandisk from windows.

Assuming from the details above, OP is using Linux, so either OP doesnt have windows on the machine and if so, scandisk wont be able to scan an ext2/ext3 filesystem.

OP, is the bios reporting any HDD smart errors?

Try downloading the diagnostic tools from the hdd manufacturer and see what it says.

conceited

Thats why you format it first.I assumed he knew that since he uses "linux"...

Snowbat

Assuming ext2 or ext3, boot from an Ubuntu CD and run this:
sudo fdisk -l

You'll see something like this:

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 1 7415 59560956 83 Linux
/dev/sda2 7416 7736 2578432+ 5 Extended
/dev/sda5 7416 7736 2578401 82 Linux swap / Solaris

For each type 83 Linux partition (there may be more than one depending on how the disk was partitioned), run sudo e2fsck -c -c on the partition. This does a non-destructive surface scan to identify bad sectors, adds any bad sectors to the bad block inode to prevent them from being allocated to a file or directory, and attempts to recover any data from the bad sectors (similar to CHKDSK /R in Windows).
eg. sudo e2fsck -c -c /dev/sda1

conceited

Very handy to see linux's way of doing it.Nice answer snowbat.

hbr

witnessmenow wrote: »

So can anyone else recomend any tools to do it?

Cheers

"man mkfs" The -c option is the one you need.

"man badblocks"

Modern drives have automatic management of bad blocks which is
transparent to the user. If you are seeing bad blocks, the drive is
probably in bad shape.

If the drive supports SMART, you can use smartmontools to
check it:
http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/
http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Monitor_your_hard_disk(s)_with_smartmontools

Since you don't need to recover any information from the drive. You
could try completely wiping the drive with "dd". Make sure you
don't run this command on the wrong drive!

"dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/xdx" where xdx is the drive device. Probably
/dev/sda for the first SATA drive or /dev/hda for the first IDE drive.

Then format the drive with mkfs using the -c option.

Nothingbetter2d

what make of hard drive is it?

i have had bad experiences with western digital drives (2 failing with in 2 days of each other both less than 10 months old) wd5000aaks is the model of drives

they sent me out reconditioned drives as replacements which arrived today...... so watch this space lol

witnessmenow

Sorry lads for not replying earlier, was on holidays.

Did snowbats method last week, And it killed my ubuntu., but i reinstalled ubuntu and its working fine now so the command must have done some good! Thanks much apprecieted

Capt'n Midnight

bit late now but smartctl is a utility to get IDE/SATA drives to do self