Hi fret
If you can hear a a very long repeating pattern of sounds when accessing the HDD, it could indicate that the HDD's heads are experiencing a tracking error (that is the heads cannot immediately align to the track on the platter, and the drive is making multiple attempts to align the heads).
The best course of action would be to run a drive specific diagnostic tool to determine the health of the HDD (look at the HDD manufacturer's www site to see if there is a tool available).
Alternatively, ***if the HDD does NOT contain any data or software that you wish to retain***, I suggest that you consider booting the laptop with a program called "killdisk" (which will detect the HDD's presence and geometry, and under user selection erase/overwrite the drive's contents), and then (if that part was error free) perform a format of the drive. Killdisk can be downloaded from the www, and run from either a bootable CD-ROM, or from a bootable (FreeDOS, etc) system diskette (floppy diskette).
If the HDD is suffering alignment problems, then it is best to "retire" the device prior to it's terminal demise.
Your laptop BIOS, and the HDD, may also support SMART. If so enable it and look for a BIOS warning/error message. SMART HDDs record counts of access errors, and other drive behaviour errors, that are read by the SMART BIOS routines.
Just as an after thought, make sure that the HDD is correctly specified in the laptop's BIOS, and that Linux is actually detecting that HDD correctly (ie. right geometry, size, etc).
Hope that assists
Chris
Last edited by cgtueno; 03-28-2014 at 05:47 AM.
Reason: typos
|