Hard disk failing??
 

Dear all,
in the last days I am having a problem with my hard disk. I guess this only windows (ntfs specific) as my linux works just great.

In the last days the windows have a lot of problems reading from the hard disks and when booting up windows are calling for scandisks. Indeed problems are found and fixed. As I was concerned regarding the files there, I have already finished the backups.

I would like to ask your help for some decent tool that can examine the hard disk and see what is going on in the low level (bad sectors?). This program should support ntfs partitions and being able to not mess up with my ext4-linux partitions.

I would like to thank you in advance for your help


Regards
Alex

you must be using Segate hard drive

Thanks. my Yast reports it as
WD3200 so I guess it is a Western Digital

hmm LOL ok but the above mentioned problem is common with segate

any ways.......you may try EaseUs

use "fsck" command

You should run a SMART long test on the drive, it also checks for bad blocks.

You can do this with 'smartctl -t long /dev/sda' or you can use one of the manufacturer's tools most of which are on the ubcd:
http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/

Personally, I would just accept that the drive needs to be replaced. Minimise use and get a replacement. Stressing the drive with a disk test is unlikely to help.

How can you be sure for that and how can you explain that the problem looks to be hitting only the ntfs partition?

In my experience, Windows has sophisticated algorithms for maintaining the NTFS file system. If you are starting to see errors that Windows needs to recover from, then it suggests that deterioration of areas of the disk is occurring. That it is only happening on your NTFS partition may be due to the quality of the disk surface in that area, or perhaps a developing fault in the electronics that drive the head to that area of the disk.

Can it be also something else? This hard disk is in a three years old laptop and I wonder if I should replace the hard disk or sell it as second-hand in ebay and buy a new one?

What hard disk alternatives can a three years old laptop support. Can it support any 1TB hard disk like
http://www.amazon.de/Western-Digital...637838&sr=1-13


Smart output also given here
http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/442/smarts.png/

Your SMART output shows that the reallocated sector count has exceeded the threshold as well as a high multizone error count, consistent with the problem you are reporting.

A problem is indicated when the current value is below the threshold. High numbers in the "Value" column are good.

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.M.A.R.T.
and

I am confused is my hard disk at bad state or not??

This comes from linux smart

Yes - the disk is bad. If you do not have backups already, consider ddrescue ASAP.

Can it be some other problem or should I just replace the hard disk or it might be also the motherboard or something else?

The HDD is definitely failing because of the short test and there is no reason to suspect any other component at this time.

Are there any limitations on what hard disk I can install on a laptop?
Actually I am thinking between those two


http://www.amazon.de/Western-Digital...3705159&sr=1-3

http://www.amazon.de/Seagate-Momentu...3705162&sr=1-1

have a look at the thumbnails where the achieved speeds are written.
What is the process now I should follow to copy the current partitions to the new external disk, before I replace it to the laptop? I have already these atapi/sata to usb cables.


after edit: The model I already have
http://www.ebay.com/itm/WESTERN-DIGI...-/190577925523

Those comments are referring to the raw values, which were not shown in the screen capture. Applying that interpretation to the normalized values is dead wrong. For the normalized values, which are what is shown in the "Value" column, high numbers are good and values below the threshold indicate failure.

From the data shown, the disk does not appear to be in perfect health, but without the raw values it's hard to make a judgement. (I really hate fancy tools that suppress important information.)

[Edit]: I just saw the followup post that does show the raw values. 111 reallocated sectors and 112 more sectors pending reallocation and currently visibly bad to the OS. Yes, it's bad.

I would get the seagate drive, but it's a matter of personal choice. I don't like WD drives.

Can it be that my laptop does not support the new one_ Please have a look above on the model I gave so to suggest me what to do.

regards
Alex

It looks like this is your current HDD:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822136197
So my recommendation is:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822148599
Any 2.5 inch HDD with SATA 3.0Gb/s (revision 2.0) should work.

However, I do NOT guarantee that it will work. You never know with an old laptop. I replaced the IDE drive on my old laptop and it didn't recognize it, probably because of a BIOS issue.

I bought the disk. What is the procedure now to clone the old partition to the new one? As my linux is still running I was thinking to connect the new hard disk with atapi to usb cables to complete the clone first. I am more intrested in cloning that hidden laptop partition that is used to recover the official windows 7. Is there something special with that partition for cloning it?

Alex

I recommend using:
http://clonezilla.sourceforge.net/
It can do a lot and is easier and safer to use than 'dd'.

Thanks for the suggestion, is there any recommendations for copying the hidden partition (i.e like flags that I need to set)?

If you use clonezilla to read your disk with bad sectors, you will probably need to select "Expert" mode and use the "-rescue" option. Otherwise it will stop on the first failed read. The "-rescue" option in clonezilla is not as good as the error handling in ddrescue or gddrescue, so you might have to use one of those tools to copy partitions containing bad sectors.

The clonezilla live CD contains both those tools.

Hi, how I can later to extend the partitions? The new hard disk would be larger than the one I currently have
Alex

For the Linux ext2/3/4 partitions, it's easy. Make the new partitions the size you want, use clonezilla or whatever tool to copy the old filesystem into the new, larger partition. Then run resize2fs on the new partition, and it will automatically extend the filesystem to fill the partition.

For Windows, the NTFS resizing tools I've found do not seem to understand the notion of extending the filesystem unless they are also changing the partition size at the same time. So, you would need to make the new partition slightly smaller than intended, copy the filesystem over, and then use gparted, ntfsresize, or one of the available Windows tools to adjust the partition size and make the filesystem fit. (Perhaps you don't intend to change the size of your NTFS partition. That would be the easiest.)

For a swap partition, there is of course no reason to copy the old partition. Just run mkswap on the new partition.

I can not copy the windows partitions through clonezilla software?

Yes, you can. The issue is that if you copy, for example, a 5GB filesystem into a 10GB partition, there is no tool that I have found that you can tell, "Expand this filesystem to fill the existing 10GB partition.) You would need to do something like, "Shrink the partition to 9.9GB, then expand the partition back to 10GB, adjusting the filesystem size each time." Personally, I try to avoid doing things that way. YMMV.

For ext2/3/4, using resize2fs to expand a filesystem to fill an existing partition is the default mode of operation.

clonezilla never changes the size of a filesystem. It will leave you with a small filesystem (same size as the original) sitting in your large partition.

Total Failure:
I have been launching clonezilla (which I found a terribly designed gui) and went to konsole

I entered root mode through sudo su -

and then I did e2fsck -fp /dev/sdb1

then I did

ddrescue -v /dev/sda /dev/sdb

that returned an error that /dev/sdb has data that would be lost and I have to use --force.
So I used
ddrescue -v --force /dev/sda /dev/sdb

when I returned back. The /dev/sdb had only three partitions out of 8.

I have read also those two tutorials here
http://www.ghacks.net/2010/08/01/clo...with-ddrescue/
http://dimitar.me/clone-disk-drives-with-ubuntu/

but I can not see why it failed so much.

Any help now?
Alex[COLOR="Silver"]

Hi, I would be happy if just the 320gb hard disk (source) is written as it in the 750gb (target) and leave the rest space unallocated, I will try to expand it later with other tools.

I tried yesterday launching with clonezilla (what a bad interface is that!!) and launched the terminal. What a total failure was that.


I entered root mode through sudo su -

and then I did e2fsck -fp /dev/sdb1

then I did

ddrescue -v /dev/sda /dev/sdb

that returned an error that /dev/sdb has data that would be lost and I have to use --force.
So I used
ddrescue -v --force /dev/sda /dev/sdb

when I returned back. The /dev/sdb had only three partitions out of 8.

I have read also those two tutorials here
http://www.ghacks.net/2010/08/01/clo...with-ddrescue/
Clone Disk Drives with Ubuntu using dd or ddrescue | dimitar.me

but I can not see why it failed so much.

Any help now?

my source disk now looks like:



and the target disk is the:

So, are you trying to clone the disk from /dev/sda to /dev/sdb or to /dev/sdc ?

From sda to sdb. After I tried with ddrescue that failed (as I described) the hard disk on the currently installed linux system (sda) was recognized as sdc (that is the reason I had to to fdisk -l /dev/sdc)

Can you run fdisk on /dev/sdb.

No, because there is´no such disk in the system

I was also concerded why the kernel gave the disk the name sdc and not sdb.... When I also launch Yast-> Partitioner, there is no there sdb, only sda and sdc.

IF you want I can reboot but I think the main concern is how I make ddrescue clone partition by partition... and why it failed producing 3 non-sense partitions.

regards
Alex

That is unusual. You probably should reboot and try again. Make sure that both disks are recognized before trying to clone the disk.

Which command do you suggest me to run after both disks are recognized correctly as sda and sdb?

Alex

Do take into account that SMART reported read failure meaning that cloning the partitions may not work no matter what tool you use. In other words, the disk is corrupt and trying to clone corrupt partitions will likely lead to corrupt partitions or it just won't work.

I recommend trying to backup your files and then just reinstall everything onto the new disk.

It may have been my mistake to assume that you were doing this to try to salvage your data. It is true that cloning the drive is a good thing to do, but you shouldn't expect the drive you clone to to be bootable and usable. Instead you should recover your files from there and then reinstall everything onto this new drive.

Indeed that might be true. I would try again with dd_rhelp and see if there is anything coming out, if not I would say that the minimum is to copy just the hidden partition where the windows 7 installation resides (my opensuse is already downloaded and my data are backed up). Do you have any tips on how to copy the first hidden partition? Is there something important about a hidden partition or is just a normal one? Alex

The output from "fdisk -l" makes it appear that the new drive has a 4096-byte logical sector size. What is the make and model for that drive, and what is the output from "hdparm -I /dev/sdc | grep 'Sector size'". Drives with a 4096 logical sector size are only supported by recent kernels and tools, and even then are very bleeding edge. It well could be that clonezilla does not support them. (Drives with 4096 physical / 512 logical are not a problem except for alignment issues).

The drive probably migrated from sdb to sdc because you unplugged it (as sdb) while there was still some open reference to it. That leaves sdb in use, and when you reconnect the drive you get the next available device number.

This is a normal 2.5 inches western digital 750gigabytes hard disk! If I did something wronng that should be easily fixable with some command line commands.
1. Which one should I try?

The target is just to clone only the first hidden windows partition to the hard disk and just restore windows from scratch. Installing linux then would be quite straightforward.


2. What is the ddrescue command for cloning the first partition of sda1 to sdb1?

3. Should I have in advance created an almost similar partition size to the target disk? If yes how I can do that with commands like fsck?

Regards
Alex

What exact model number, please.

Western Digital WD7500BPKT Black 750GB . Where I can find the model number?

"WD7500BPKT" is it. According to the Spec. sheet, that drive has 512-byte logical sectors ("User sectors per drive 1,465,149,168"), so I don't understand the "Note: sector size is 4096 (not 512)" output from fdisk. What does report about the physical and logical sector sizes?

From what I've seen browsing the clonezilla forums, I'm not optimistic about it's ability to work with 4096-byte logical sectors, though no one has yet responded to my specific query. That's why I'd like to be sure that's not what you're dealing with.

Well it might went something wrong with clonezilla rescue operations. How I can "reset" the hard disk to the factory defaults before starting any rescue operations?

Regard
Aex

It should be sufficient just to zero out the partition table.If your drive is not currently being seen as "sdc", of course, change that as needed. Do be sure to get it right. You really don't want to be wiping out the MBR of the wrong disk just now.