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Old 09-06-2005, 10:08 AM   #1
pajohn
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Registered: Sep 2005
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Hard drive problems


first of all, let me give some background. I have a sony pcg z1-vap laptop with an 80 gig hd. It came with windows installed on one ntfs partition (about 7 gig), with the rest going into a large (70 gig) ntfs partition. I shrunk the large partition down and then installed linux to make a dual boot system. A while later, when I was booting windows, it gave me disc errors. I ran the disc check utility and it found them and then marked those spots as bad. This happened many times, and each time it'd find more errors.

A few weeks ago, I went to boot my computer, and it gave Grub error 17 (I think that's the number), and it wouldnt boot. I just decided to install kubuntu on my entire drive, wiping the ntfs partitions. This would boot and be fine for a few days, but then I started getting the following error message on boot: (this is what's on my screen)

"
14155840, sector 30933055
ide : failed opcode was : unknown
end_request : I/O error , dev hda , sector 30933055
hda : dma_intr : status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
hda : dma_intr : error 0x40 { UncorrectableError },40108-97 high=2, low-655365, sector=40108095

"
or somehing like this which was repeated a bunch of times. Finally at the end, it said:

"
ReiserFS: hda1 : warning: sh-2029: reiserfs read_bitmaps : bitmap block (#32768) reading failed
ReiserFS : hda1 : warning: jmacd-8 reiserfs_fill_super : unable to read bitmap
pivot_root : No such file or directory
/sbin/init : 428 : cannot open dev/console: No such file
Kernel panic - not syncing : Attempted to kill init!
"

When I try to install Kubuntu with ext3, it'd go through the whole thing "partitions formatting" "creating ext3 file system for / in partition#1 of IDE1 master (hda)..."
it would hang at 33% and then take me to a red screen that said:

"The ext3 file system creating in partition#1 of IDE1 master (hda) failed."

I tried installing opensuse, and It wouldnt partition either. I've never encountered this before. I would guess that my hd is crap, or maybe there are bad sectors that the comp tries to write kernel info onto. Any ideas would be appreciated. One thing I haven't done yet is try partitioning with a live cd, but I figured that that install discs work much the same way, and I wouldnt be getting any better results with those.

Any ideas? Is there a linux disc checker?
Thanks.
 
Old 09-06-2005, 01:40 PM   #2
etruiii
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Registered: Apr 2005
Location: Louisville, KY
Distribution: SuSE, Fedora, Mandrake/Mandriva, Linspire
Posts: 25

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I had a similar problem with an 80G Seagate hardrive.
Turns out my drive had a bad sector on it that I couldn't work around. If it were a desktop, I would recommend connecting it to another machine, but that's probably not a viable option for you.

There are a number of forensic tools for UNIX that will work on a Linux machine (most of which are far from cheap and are more tuned to data recovery), but if you are looking for a quick fix (and one that is a bit more cost effective), I would try the boots disks for Partition Magic. The problem is finding someone who has a copy of Partition Magic. Otherwise you'll have to cough up the $25 to $30 purchase price, find a computer you can install it on and create the disks yourself. I suppose the other problem here would be if your laptop doesn't have a floppy drive.

The boot disks will run similar to a Windows boot disk and will allow you to reformat if it is possible. If it isn't possible, it will give you an error. If that is the case, it's not going to make a lot of difference whether you are running Linux or Windows, it (at least in my experience) won't work.

The other option would be to get someone to check the drive for you, but then you get to weigh the labor cost against the possible replacement costs.

Hope that helps.

Good luck.
 
  


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