I am using Mint 18 and 18.1, booted on the same drive with Windows 7. About five times it crashed and Gparted fixed it by opting to check and fix partition.

This happened on both Mint installs. I use a lot of RAM with many tabs open. I am not sure of the cause. Maybe a hacker?

Gparted used to fix it, from a thumb drive. Now it was difficult to start Gparted. It showed errors fsync, drive 2 to 9 as I opted to "ignore" again and again. When it opened, it found no partitions at all. I could not check the drive.

Here is my old question:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...rt-4175609431/

Please take a screenshot of GParted showing the drive (make sure that you are looking at the correct drive with GParted - there should be a drop-down at the top right-hand side of the screen) and post it here.

It sounds like the drive is failing.

Yes, looks like my drive is failing. I have the same OS running in the next room on mum's computer. No problems there. I can run lspci but from the thumb drive, what is the password?

Gparted finds the HDD empty of any partitions. The full number of Gb all free. I tried booting from the other Mint OS on my drive and got into Gparted and fixed it. But again it crashed a few times. Looked like RAM overload, many tabs open. Firefox and Chromium would not restart as they initially crash before the system will not reboot. Firefox read an error in "child process" on restart attempt.

Trying to restart the computer mentions HD0 and "load kernel first".

I updated both Mints, and one of them with the full list updated including kernel.

I think I ran bleachbit on the drive.

Now also, if I use the on off button to force quit, as I have had to, it also automatically restarts without a second press.

In Mint I started up in safe mode and ran chdsk and once again things are going. May get a new desktop.