One and a half year ago, I bought for my wife an Acer aspire 5253 with Windows 7 installed.
On the 320 GB hard drive it had 3 primary partitions, I reduced one of them and made a 4th primary partition of 160 GB and installed Kubuntu 11.04, later upgraded to 12.04
Until now it worked perfect, but a week ago Kubuntu refused to boot but did so after a partition check with gparted.
After a couple of boots I had to use recovery mode fsck to make it boot and finally it refused to boot altogether.
Windows 7 still booting OK.
I deleted the linux primary partition, made an extended partition with two ext3 partitions and installed Kubuntu 12.10 and Mint 14.
Both only boot properly after recovery mode fsck without this they boot sometimes but with the wrong monitor resolution 1024x768 instead of 1366x768.
Windows still boots OK, so I don't think it is the hard drive, but what is going on?
I changed FSCKFIX=no to FSCKFIX=yes in /etc/default/rcS in Mint 14 and it boots easier now.
Please help?

To really rule out a hardware error I recommend to start with testing the disk with the manufacturer's diagnosis tool.

Thank you TobiSGD, I'll give that a try.

The hard drive is Toshiba MK3265GSX and the tool,I downloaded is fjdtwin.exe.
unfortunately this does not seem to work in Windows 7.
I didn't found another diagnostics tool.

Try the one from Hitachi, it usually works with disks from any vendor: https://www1.hgst.com/hdd/support/do...2_v416_b00.iso
Just burn it to a CD as you would do with a Linux CD and boot the computer from it.

Thank you again, but the Hitachi test asks me to agree and when I do than tells me: "Please reboot your system."
I downloaded Sea tools for windows and that worked.
All the tests passed.
The trick with FSCKFIX=no to FSCKFIX=yes in /etc/default/rcS works quit well so far, but why should the partitions being checked before each boot?
Something must be wrong but what?