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01-26-2020, 04:40 PM
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#1
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Senior Member
Registered: Jan 2002
Location: Nanjing, China
Distribution: Ubuntu 22.04
Posts: 2,151
Rep:
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hard drive killer laptop
I use my old Samsung laptop at home for tinkering and general trying things out. It is much slower than my new one, but that is really for work.
A couple of days ago, the computer froze, could not be rebooted, fsck could not solve the problem. I put it down to the old (magnetic) hd gone wrong. The boot sector damaged. I put it in an usb external drive holder. I can still access my files.
I took out the old drive and put in a 124GB ssd drive which already had Ubuntu 18.o4 installed. It is not very old, maybe 2 years.
Yesterday, that crashed too! Again, if I put it in an usb external drive holder, I can still access my files.
Something tells me, the old laptop is responsible, not a fault in both drives.
What might cause the old laptop to mess up the drives??
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01-26-2020, 07:19 PM
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#2
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Moderator
Registered: Feb 2003
Location: Arizona, USA
Distribution: Debian, EndeavourOS, OpenSUSE, KDE Neon
Posts: 4,027
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Failing SATA controller or connector.
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1 members found this post helpful.
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01-26-2020, 09:08 PM
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#3
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Senior Member
Registered: Jan 2002
Location: Nanjing, China
Distribution: Ubuntu 22.04
Posts: 2,151
Original Poster
Rep:
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I've been trying to reinstall Ubuntu without touching the home folder.
Both drives are causing the same problems:
1. they both said: "No wifi adaptor" at reboot, although the installer usb stick connected to the wifi during the installation!
2. they both had miserable screen resolution after rebooting into the new installation.
I went to system settings, tried to set the display, not ppossible and wifi says: no wifi adaptor!
Weird!
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01-26-2020, 11:14 PM
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#4
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Moderator
Registered: Feb 2003
Location: Arizona, USA
Distribution: Debian, EndeavourOS, OpenSUSE, KDE Neon
Posts: 4,027
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So, is it crashing or are these things just not working? There's a fairly major difference.
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1 members found this post helpful.
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01-27-2020, 06:13 AM
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#5
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LQ Guru
Registered: Sep 2011
Location: Upper Hale, Surrey/Hants Border, UK
Distribution: One main distro, & some smaller ones casually.
Posts: 5,773
Rep: 
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Some of your problems may be down to dirty electrical contacts, if you can open it up, remove & reinsert them a couple of times, it may help; but as above, it could be other controllers failing.
Edit: You might as well clean your ram contacts too, never hurts.
Last edited by fatmac; 01-27-2020 at 06:19 AM.
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1 members found this post helpful.
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01-27-2020, 10:41 AM
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#6
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Senior Member
Registered: Oct 2003
Posts: 3,015
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After cleaning your ram contacts as suggested above, check your ram with memtest86+. It should be a boot selection on your ubuntu installation. Let it run overnight and see if any errors are reported.
Also, blow out any accumulated dust as that can cause overheating and erratic behavior.
Last edited by kilgoretrout; 01-27-2020 at 10:42 AM.
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1 members found this post helpful.
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01-27-2020, 11:04 PM
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#7
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Senior Member
Registered: Jan 2002
Location: Nanjing, China
Distribution: Ubuntu 22.04
Posts: 2,151
Original Poster
Rep:
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In the end, I put the drives in an external usb hd holder, copied over everything to another external hd, ran gparted to delete the partitions, formatted new, then reinstalled Ubu. As of now, the old laptop is behaving.
At least I know I can retrieve the hds!
I cleaned the contacts. I used a rubber to clean the RAM contacts, someone told me that was a good method!
Thanks for the advice!
@ Timothy Miller: What happened was after shutdown, on reboot, the screen froze at the same place for both hds, just a black screen with the boot procedure text. fsck could not save the day!
Last edited by Pedroski; 01-27-2020 at 11:08 PM.
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