buffer i/o error on device logical block

swedex

My sister gave me her laptop to see if I could fix it, it's Win7 and having KSOD's (Black Screen of Death). There's a recovery partition on it so I was just going to pull the data off it and reinstall it.

I got a ubuntu cd and booted to it and selected to run Ubuntu from CD without making changes, all seemed to be going fine until these "buffer i/o error on device logical block" errors starting happening.

I tried different cd's, each time the same would happen and I never got ubuntu to run. I know f'all about linux but I'm guessing this is drive failure????

Anybody know what the errors mean?

Ant

Given that you get the same errors with different CDs, your guess is most likely the correct one. A faulty drive generates those kind of errors and after that, the next most likely suspect is a dodgy IDE Controller. Both faults are as problematic as each other.

Another possibility is that all the CDs you've tried are from the same faulty batch. It sometimes happens that after a number of years, CDs from low-quality batch start to lose their integrity, resulting in READ errors. It mightn't do any harm to try a different brand of CD when burning the installation image. I'd also suggest testing your install media as described at https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation/CDIntegrityCheck

If there is a serious problem with your drive / controller, you'll have to boot via USB.

swedex

Booting from USB worked, although I still have an issue I can't find the Windows drive. I think I'm looking in the right direction under Computer??

Khannie

I'd say the windows drive needs to be mounted. The "disk utility" should allow you to do that. For me it's under system->admin->disk utility but I've an older version of ubuntu here (not unity based).

swedex

Getting closer I hope. Found "disk utility", under Sata Disk Adaptor is the 500 GB hard drive. When I click it, it's split into 3 volumes, all unknown, first is 418 MB and the other 2 are 250 GB (I thought a recovery partition would be about 5 GB or so). I can't see anything about mounting them only formating and partitioning the drives.

Any ideas?

Khannie

swedex wrote: »

I can't see anything about mounting them only formating and partitioning the drives.

Any ideas?

That is smelly. It smells like a borked drive. Here's what mine looks like, now I don't know how useful it is to you because I have software RAID set up, but you can see the "unmount" option there. That's where your "mount" option should be on whatever the partition is.



The alternative is the command line, which I didn't suggest because I'm not sure how familiar you are with it, but let's go there.

Open a terminal and type sudo -i <enter>
then fdisk -l
you should see the device (most likely /dev/sda) and its partition table (or it will say the device doesn't have a valid partition table).

If you see the one you want, you can mount it like this:

mkdir /tmp/mount
mount /dev/sda<x> /tmp/mount
where <x> is the partition number you want to mount. Then you can just browse to /tmp/mount.

swedex

So close, yet so far it seems.

Your directions went perfectly, although I was getting worried at the length of time it was taking to mount the partition, half hour at least. And then:

mount: /dev/sda2: can't read superblock

Doesn't look too promising.

BTW, thanks for the help, it's much appreciated.

swedex

Urgh, rather annoyingly I can mount and access the recovery partition no problem but not where I want to get.

Khannie

Sounds like the drive is fecked. I recommend photorec for file recovery from that partition. It's free and effective and doesn't require a mount.

swedex

Photorec installed and recovering files.

I've never really used linux too much before but the little crash course here and reading up on it, it doesn't seem as scary anymore. I'm really quite liking ubuntu.

One final question, if the drive is as bad as it seems is there any point in reinstalling the OS?

Khannie

swedex wrote: »

One final question, if the drive is as bad as it seems is there any point in reinstalling the OS?

Well....drives are expensive. You could run a low level scan on it to see if it's actually borked. Worth checking the SMART status on the drive too. It may have just been some kind of unusual corruption, but it smells like a smelly drive to me. It depends how much money you have. Very poor: Definitely be certain that the drive is arsed. Not very poor: Throw it far, far away.

swedex

If drives are expensive, hardship is free. Got a new drive ordered and ubuntu is going to stay in it permanently, I have no interest in wasting time figuring out Microsoft's licensing.

Thanks for the help.