Replaced a couple of years ago (after only a couple of years of use) this teenager's laptop HDD is detected (dmesg|tail reads it as /dev/sdc) but I can't see it with gParted, GNOME Disk management, I can't dd stuff on it or mount it... it just hangs.

I can hear the disk spinning, I can hear the reader head going back and forth once per second.

Now, I'm thinking it could be a bad reader head... but it has been changed barely a couple of years ago. I don't want to just assume stuff: Do you guys have a way to diagnose this properly?

Run the disk manufacturer's diagnosis tool on it or use the smartctl command to show the self-diagnosis report of the disk:Age is no indication if a disk is bad or good, especially when it comes to mobile devices.

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Hi fret

If you can hear a a very long repeating pattern of sounds when accessing the HDD, it could indicate that the HDD's heads are experiencing a tracking error (that is the heads cannot immediately align to the track on the platter, and the drive is making multiple attempts to align the heads).

The best course of action would be to run a drive specific diagnostic tool to determine the health of the HDD (look at the HDD manufacturer's www site to see if there is a tool available).

Alternatively, ***if the HDD does NOT contain any data or software that you wish to retain***, I suggest that you consider booting the laptop with a program called "killdisk" (which will detect the HDD's presence and geometry, and under user selection erase/overwrite the drive's contents), and then (if that part was error free) perform a format of the drive. Killdisk can be downloaded from the www, and run from either a bootable CD-ROM, or from a bootable (FreeDOS, etc) system diskette (floppy diskette).

If the HDD is suffering alignment problems, then it is best to "retire" the device prior to it's terminal demise.

Your laptop BIOS, and the HDD, may also support SMART. If so enable it and look for a BIOS warning/error message. SMART HDDs record counts of access errors, and other drive behaviour errors, that are read by the SMART BIOS routines.

Just as an after thought, make sure that the HDD is correctly specified in the laptop's BIOS, and that Linux is actually detecting that HDD correctly (ie. right geometry, size, etc).

Hope that assists

Chris