Hi!

So, here's the story.

I've got Acer Aspire S3 laptop, and disk on it started to give bad sector errors from time to time. It wasn't in a critical state, and stuff like that happened every 2-3 days, but I decided to replace the drive to avoid losing my data.

So, I bought a new hard drive, but after installing linux all I get is either

or simply

Now, after trying about a dozen different solutions for the problem to no success, I assumed the new drive is faulty and got another one, and ensured it's identical to the one I had before. Linux Mint installed with no any troubles, as usual, however, yet again, I boot into the same error. Weirdly enough, sometimes (seems randomly) it goes to a boot menu, but instead of loading the OS, computer restarts after a couple of seconds of black screen.

After this, I realized it might not be connected with the drive at all. So, I inserted my old drive, but it gives me, yet again, exactly the same error! Surely, this one has grub in order, as I was able to load from it before replacement and never seen this error with it. So, error must reside outside of the drive?! At least this is my reasoning, I simply don't know what else to think...

So, I'm in complete confusion. Is it not hard drive which has a problem? Might it be some hardware problem with some other part of my laptop? Or did I mess something up while trying to fix the issue?

Any insight into this is greatly appreciated.


UPDATE

Why my problem looks different to other similar problems?
1. It persists for different hard drives, with different operating systems. I've got two new hard drives and one old, on which a working Linux Mint is installed. I didn't do any destructive tests on the latter, but it stopped working after I tried putting it back in. Unlike fresh installation of Mint on any of the other two drives, this one does load the system ~10% of the times...
2. The error itself is volatile, randomly throwing out two different errors or on occasion booting the grub menu or very rarely even the OS itself.

What I've tried:

1. I ran memtest for ~10 hours and it did 8 full passes with no errors found.
2. I ran full destructive read-write badblocks test on both of the new hard drives with no errors found.
3. Standard boot-repair run doesn't seem to do anything.
4. I tried to install different things on different drives, trying out Mandriva, Debian, Mint, Fedora and Windows 7 on two of the new hard drives, to pretty similar results. Some of these (Debian, Mint) display grub error almost every time, rarely going to boot menu, but never proceed further, throwing "attempt to read or write" at me after I choose any option. Others (Mandriva, Fedora) display all the range of responses, from any of the two above errors, to freezing on black screen after I choose what to load, and even loading the whole thing with no issue on rare attempts. Windows 7 always gave me disk read error.
5. I tried various recommendations for manual partitioning (i.e., creating /boot separately, putting it at the beginning of the drive), don't remember all of them, but it doesn't seem to be the issue as the old drive with default installation worked fine before.
6. I tried to fix grub as described here and to reinstall it.
7. Checked BIOS hard drive size limitation, it is not the issue. And I did select AHCI (although tried IDE as well) during the installation. BIOS does recognize the drives.

yes, it looks like (not related to the hard drive, but) a hardware problem with some other part. You can also try to boot from usb (even without HDD) to check.

Yes, I booted and installed various flavours of linux from USB (to try and see if they show different behaviour: they don't). I also ran different hard drive checks, like badsector and boot repair, with no errors.

Have you tried letting memtest86+ run overnight to check for memory problems?

Yes, memtest didn't find any errors, neither did badsector full destructive test. In any case, since now I have three different drives, all exhibiting the same behaviour, it's safe to assume that the problem is somewhere else.

Update:

Have been able to boot from my old drive. Restarted, saw the error again, restarted another dozen times and booted again (writing from within my old Linux Mint installation now). That's some random stuff, have no idea what's going on...

First hit in Google. There is more.

As I mentioned, I have tried this, and all other possible things about this error I was able to find on the internet. My problem is different from all those as it persists on different drives, for different Linux distros, which can't all have the same bug.

should be specified "all the other possible things" you tried and also please describe how your problem is different. Otherwise we may give you another useless hint...

Sorry, guys, I should have listed all the things I tried in the first place. Updated the post. Tried some of 'em again to make sure...

Please let me know what other info would be helpful and what tests/scripts I should run to diagnose the issue.

ok, so start over again, and post what have you done exactly and what's happened. If you have no other idea just start with the link posted in #7

I'm not sure how repeating same thing over again will help me with anything. Any of the solutions I listed didn't bring absolutely any change to the problem. And all the three things mentioned in #7 are listed in "things I tried".

Frankly speaking, I'm quite tired of trying things for the sake of it. It's a wild goose chase. There's a million things which can be wrong with a hard drive, or motherboard, or some other thing, and simply trying all of the fixes will take me forever, especially if the problem is not with the hard drive in the first place (at least this is how it looks to me now).

What diagnostic tools could I use to at least find out where the booting process fails and which part of my computer is failing. When I know that, at least it will somewhat limit the solutions. Right now I can just go through the whole internet and there will still be lots of things I haven't tried.

OK, SOLVED!

I figured hard drives can't be the problem, and the motherboard doesn't seem to have any obvious issues either, otherwise there'd be problems with working from USB boot, which works perfectly.

Then, the only place the problem might reside is somewhere in between these two. So, I cracked it open once again, removed the cable connecting the drive to the motherboard and noticed the tiniest of dust particles sitting on one of the contacts. It must have got there when I was replacing the drive for the very first time, and since I only disconnect the part of the cable which goes into the hard drive, it was sitting there unmoved all this time.

Phew! Such a stupid thing and so much trouble from it. Like my dad taught me: "If it doesn't work, disassemble it and assemble it back, that will solve it in 90% of situations"