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#1 2008-10-11 12:29:35

hauntergeist
Member
From: Vienna
Registered: 2008-10-11
Posts: 56

hard disk drive damaged?

Hello.

My situation is as follows:
I usually work with my Dell C660 Notebook with a WinXP/ArchLinux-Dualboot. This morning I was browsing in the web with XP and afterwards shut it down in a normal and controlled way. Then I realized, that I forgot something and wanted to reboot XP. I chose "WinXP" at GRUB and a few seconds and a black screen later it says "Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt: <Windows root>\system32\hal.dll"

Okay, I thought, I will start Arch instead, but after a few seconds a certain error message begins to iterate again and again:

ata1.00: status: { DRDY ERR }
ata1.00: error: { UNC }
ata1.00: configured for UDMA/100
ata1: EH complete

This messages was interrupted by other sd*-related messages but they were too long and too fast to recognize. After the messages recurred several times, Arch seems to skip this step and to proceed the boot process. Arch waits for the "devices to settle" and starts Udev but from then it is hanging (I can hear that the hardware is working with short, jerky noises, the same noises occured when the error messages appeared, very unusual) and does not proceed.

Because it is independent of the OS I suppose it's a hardware related issue. Is my drive dying? Normally, I would have tried to put in an Arch-LiveCD but the CD is 500 km away roll and even if I had my CD available I wouldn't know how to check my drive.

Did I change anything on the notebook in the last few days?
Yes, I installed Mathematica 6.0 and because I only have a WLAN-shared internet connection available at home, I had to buy a wireless network adapter (cardbus) "D-Link DWL-G630" (actually it only works with WinXP and I had not the time to set up a connection with Arch) and installed the driver and the firmware. And moreover, I made a Windows Update (SP3).
But these changes were made at least 1 or 2 days ago and I could browse the web this morning.

I would really appreciate any answers as this is my only computer with which I have to work (and the backup drive is 500km away hmm).

Greetings,
hauntergeist

P.S.: It may can take some time for me to answer as I have now only internet access via university supported pc's at my faculty.

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#2 2008-10-11 12:56:30

dschrute
Member
From: NJ, USA
Registered: 2007-04-09
Posts: 183

Re: hard disk drive damaged?

It does sound like a hardware issue.  There are a few decent bootable rescue cd/live distributions out there that include very good diagnostic tools.  Maybe you could get someone to download/burn one for you.  My personal favorites are System Rescue CD ( http://www.sysresccd.org/ ) and Ultimate Boot CD ( http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/ ).  But any Live CD distro should have enough tools included for you to test and possible recover something.
Good luck.

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#3 2008-10-11 13:07:14

xdeusx
Member
Registered: 2007-10-15
Posts: 168

Re: hard disk drive damaged?

You can use smartmontools to access the SMART data of your drive. That should give you an idea if the drive is about to fail.

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#4 2008-10-11 13:33:07

hauntergeist
Member
From: Vienna
Registered: 2008-10-11
Posts: 56

Re: hard disk drive damaged?

Thanks for the answers.
I think I will use the systemrescue-CD. The ide-smart and smartmontools (with a long selftest) will deliver enough information. Or does anybody know another tool how to check if the disk already failed?

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#5 2008-10-12 12:30:02

WildEagle
Member
Registered: 2008-02-05
Posts: 8

Re: hard disk drive damaged?

I have the same problem about four days ago. In my case it wasn't an hardware fault. I had to reset pc a couple of time and that silently corrupted my ext3 root. Pc worked normally but messages.log was full of your type of errors. I had to reboot in archlinux boot cd and execute fsck -f -c -v /dev/sda1 a couple of times. The first time it finded many inode duplicate error and 5 badblocks. The next (after it had corrected "inode duplicate error" ) it didn't found any badblocks. smartctl -a /dev/sda show about 150 errors like "Error: UNC at LBA = 0x0d9a254d". After fsck that number isn't growing more.
I think that when I wanted to approach the file with duplicate inodes the disk put too much time to answer the demand and it gone timeup.
If your specific SMART attributes have never failed (column WHEN_FAILED of smartctl -a /dev/sda) then try to make fsck. smile

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#6 2008-10-16 09:08:16

hauntergeist
Member
From: Vienna
Registered: 2008-10-11
Posts: 56

Re: hard disk drive damaged?

Ok, i got my SystemRescue-CD. I booted from CD and started smartctl -t long -l selftest /dev/sda > /mnt/usb/selftest.txt to test my drive and print the output on my USB stick.
While the test proceeded I went out of my room and cooked so I dont have to sit in my room and wait. When I went back the screen was black ... I realized that I forgot to plug the notebook in and it ran on battery .... hmm´
I (re)booted the notebook several times and all I got was "Primary hard disk 0 not found" (after the BIOS startup and short before the CD was booted).
I think I sound the death knell for it through the running out of energy.
I am at my wit's end and I will go to a specialist. I want to be sure that there's nothing to save.

Thank you very much for your help. smile

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