I don't think so, but the drives are around $60 which is really not that bad.

I don't think so, but looking at the price for a 500gb ssd, it's only $60, which really isn't that bad.

sorry for the double message, didn't realize there was a second page and I thought the message hadn't sent.

I disagree. He is thinking EXACTLY like a young intern. An older person would know that their time is more valuable than the $300 laptop.

I have to wonder if the internship is unpaid it sounds like it is. If it was a paid internship and I was his supervisor after a week of this I would have walked up, picked up the laptop, and folded it backwards, destroying the screen and case. Then I would have told him "do not ever waste the company's money like you have been doing again."

He needs to put in a requisition to IT for a new laptop. He is wasting his time and the company's time trying to fix hardware that clearly is either broken or not designed for Linux. I have yet to run into a machine that runs perfectly on Windows and boots Linux then corrupts data but I won't say that such a thing does not exist. Regardless, if the machine was a "gift" from his boss then he is wasting his time trying to fix it, if it is his own machine he bought he needs to get rid of it to a Windows user, if it's the company's then the IT group is responsible for it. His job is to intern for this business it is not to spend $2000 of employee time trying to fix a $300 laptop.

One of the points of being an intern is to LEARN. Well, he needs to learn when it's time to cut his losses and that time is long past in this case. The world is full of laptops virtually all of which don't have problems like this. Dump this loser device and get a different one. Spending heroic efforts on a $1200 laptop is one thing, that might be justified particularly when you have an office full of 200 others of the same mode. But doing the same on a $300 device is quite another and much worse if it's a unique sample.

This is my PERSONAL LAPTOP that I bought with my OWN MONEY, which, if you haven't already found out, I don't have a lot of! I'm trying to keep this laptop going for as long as I can, I don't have the money to go out and just pick up a $1000 laptop. I asked my boss about the issue I was having ONCE, and I was going to talk to him briefly only once more. I have not been working on this laptop during work hours, I have been doing it on my own time. And I think it would be a great learning experience to snap this laptop in half, definitely a great way to gain experience in repair.

If nobody else has any actual technical help and would rather just make some personal jabs, I'm just going to replace the drive.

You had said you needed it for work - and if you ARE doing work for the company they should give you a laptop. If you tell your boss how much time you have spent on this maybe he can find a "loaner" machine from IT for you.

We all were young and poor once. (well, most of us) I get it. But you are really harming yourself because the time you are spending chasing ghosts is time you could be learning on a functioning system. You are very unlikely to learn anything with this system other than what happens when you throw good money after bad. I used harsh words in my post because trying to "fix" broken gear is very very seductive as I know well and I'm hoping you can learn from my wasted time and money.

When you buy your first couple computers you get emotionally attached to them, I get it. Some people never get past that and they are the ones who have systems with liquid nitrogen coolers and other such silliness. But in the IT business after a while you get jaded. I am today removing and decommissioning systems at customer sites that I vividly remember unboxing and installing 6 years ago back when they were brand new. I've learned to limit my troubleshooting time. It is after all just gear. The software is what lives forever the box is dust. This very forum we are using has probably moved between multiple hardware boxes during it's life.

Like I said earlier - does this system work fine on Windows? If it does then it still has some value and someone somewhere could use it. For that matter if it DOES work fine under Windows then there are virtualization programs that will allow you to boot Linux in a VM under Windows.

I very much doubt the hard drive is the problem. Most laptop hard drives fail either spectacularly as in a crash or they just get slower and slower. They get slower because what is happening is that sectors all over the drive are being remapped to the bad sector table so the algorithms that try to keep files sequentially written in the filesystem are subverted. You can look at the SMART data from the drive and see this, sometimes. But if the hard drive IS the problem then it should definitely show up in a scan. A lot of people will boot a system with a Linux boot CD and go into the live filesystem, and while the physical hard drive is unmounted they will "dd" zeros to every sector of the drive, multiple times, to see if it fails. You can even boot DOS programs like Active Killdisk off a CD that will do the same thing. Give the drive a couple days of that and if it IS going bad it will fail out. I would do that before spending money on a replacement.

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Alright, thanks. I'll try running windows on it and if that works. If windows and linux both don't work, maybe i'll look into a new drive and if possible, a new laptop. I'll also be sure to throughly test the drive before buying a new one. I have a computer to use at work, this one's mostly for school. Thank you for your help.

My intention with suggesting you see if your boss can give you a hard drive is because in many IT organizations, spare parts and whole computers are a dime a dozen. There are probably numerous old ones laying around, which are perfectly fine. And sometimes you actually have to ask the "right" person. The whole purpose there would be to determine if it really is the hard drive, versus something else in the system. If the $60 is fine with you, then do that, and I hope it solves your issue. Instead leaving the thread as solved, change it back to unsolved, and state your intentions and that you may update in a few weeks once you know if a HD replacement has resolved the issue. That will be helpful to a future person diagnosing something they see as similar to your issue.

As far as the corruption occurring in the same segments. Yes it will occur in the same physical segments/sectors/paths as always, and the OS will technically try to install from the same base points all the time as well. There are hard drive tools which once they detect bad sections, they can mark those sections as bad so that they won't be used. Doesn't seem as if any tools detect any real problems.And no. Don't do this. Why try "Yet another OS?"

alright, I'll keep it unsolved until I fix the computer or get a new one. (see my previous post for more info) I'm going to be talking to my boss today, so I'll see what he has to say about all this and if there is a way he can help me, such as loaning me a hard drive.

sorry, didn't see the rest of your post. I'm going to try windows just to make sure it's not a linux issue. I haven't used windows on this laptop very much, but as far as I can tell It hasn't had any corruption issues. (although it did have a plethora of other crashes and annoyances).

It's all good, and you are learning stuff.

Along the lines of the descriptions tmittelstaedt is offering. I do agree that as you progress in this field, there comes times where you have so very many old systems, that you can pick and choose what to resurrect and maintain. Sure you will take on projects that are not necessarily gainful, except in knowledge. And sometime that knowledge will be the experience of frustration, which still teaches us all stuff, self included. I think the best things to maybe try to attain from this experience might be to develop some sort of process which you follow to diagnose system problems. You might encounter users with tons of problems during your time. Maybe you'll just be writing software and scripts in support of things like devopts or something and not helping users one-on-one. Or maybe you'll be directly aiding users in whatever company you are at. Following a logical process to determine the root causes of problems will be helpful.

And I fully get the earlier stuff. "The whole thing died .... well I guess Ubuntu was a mistake. I'll try Slackware ..." but if the same circumstance continues to occur, then there's a time to say, "Well maybe it's the needle!" (Sorry, very old Steve Martin joke, couldn't resist.) But yes, there is a time to say, "Changing OS isn't getting it done. Must be something else. So, what could it be?" And you started that by running hard drive checking tools. I can't say if that SMART report was helpful or not, I don't normally run and use them. Good luck with the next attempts.

Most of the hard drive checking tools out there are junk. dd works very well and it's free and active killdisk under DOS also works well and it's free. But trying to test a drive by running a testing program on an os that is booted off the drive your trying to test is an exercise in futility. My guess is that's what he did since the disk vendors and Lenovo all push those programs under the KISS principle.

Modern disks all remap sectors behind the scenes. There is no software that "heals" the disk like spinright used to claim to do. All you can do is write and rewrite every sector on the disk and hope that if there's a bad one the drive's computer will pull it's head out and map out the sector. Most times it does but when it won't, the disk is toasted.

My boss gave me an old hard drive (verified to work with crystaldisk info), going to try it out and see what happens.

@OP, which possibility is more plausible? That *every* distribution of Linux is corrupting your hard drive, or that you have hardware which is corrupt? If tens of millions of users are able to run Linux every day without experiencing corruption on that grand a scale, then the problem must be your hardware.

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