Hard drive crashed -- need advice

[Reincarnate]

Windows 7 64-bit Acer laptop decided to randomly spaz on me. It hangs on the "Starting Windows" animation, BSOD's if I try Safe Mode, and hangs on the green loading bar if I try the Repair option or use a Windows 7 CD.

I can boot into my Ubuntu partition OK (which is tiny but still) so I am not convinced that something's borked with the physical drive. I think one of the boot sectors got ****ed.

However, I'm not aware of any good CD's I should use to boot with that'll let me repair any potentially damaged disk sectors or whatever. Advice?

[fido123]

Re: Hard drive crashed -- need advice

If part of a disk is damaged it's damage and can't be repaired. If a boot sector got screwed you wouldn't see any "Starting Windows" at all. Other parts of your Windows system may be on damaged sectors but it might be another issue. See if you can take out your drive and put it in another computer and see if it'll boot in there to rule out everything but data corruption or a bad sector. To rule out the prior back up all your data and reformat. If it doesn't work after that you need a new hardrive. You can weed out data corruption at any time with a reformat. Also when you're reformatting actually press the "Format" button on the installer.

Also how long ago did you get this hardrive?

[Reincarnate]

Re: Hard drive crashed -- need advice

What I mean is that I think some of the files were corrupted and need repairing, that's all. I don't have another laptop to try the hard drives with. In the past I was able to run a checkdisk and that fixed the problem, but now I can't boot into my windows 7 CD to do the repair.

[UserNameGoesHere]

Re: Hard drive crashed -- need advice

Okay I don't think you mean what you wrote. If your hard drive head crashed it would be inoperable, in a click-of-death sort of way, which is apparently not the case.

In Ubuntu, go to System, Administration, Disk Utility. Click on your hard drive in the list. Run the S.M.A.R.T. self-tests on it. If it's coming up with bad sectors, there is some amount of "buffer" room on the drive set aside for that and you're "okay" but really should be thinking about replacing it if that's the case. Beyond that "buffer" though you'll start having more serious problems.

If your drive is a Seagate or Maxtor I would highly recommend purchasing and replacing it with a better drive (for example Western Digital, Hitachi, Toshiba).

If you can access your data from within Ubuntu, go ahead and burn backup disks of your data or back it up to another hard drive (only the files you want to keep).

If the drive itself isn't bad and it's only in software, your best bet is to restore from backup media or, if you don't have that, wipe the drive and reinstall Windows/everything from scratch (and if you don't have the media to do this you're kind of SOL).

Had one Seagate click-of-death on me. Another with only very light use and not that old with bad sectors. Meanwhile my Western Digitals which have had much use and quite some age still going strong, zero bad sectors even.

[Reincarnate]

Re: Hard drive crashed -- need advice

It's a separate partition (and as far as I know I can't see my Windows partition through Ubuntu, but then again I am an Ubuntu noob)

[UserNameGoesHere]

Re: Hard drive crashed -- need advice

You should be able to see/read NTFS (what WindowsXP, Vista, and 7 use) from within Ubuntu. I would not recommend writing to it (not safe), but reading from it (for example, to copy files off it) is safe. Try opening nautlius (or open a command prompt and type "nautilus" without the quotes and press enter. Applications -> Accessories -> Terminal for the command prompt.

It browses much like Windows Explorer would on Windows. There you can click on stuff, even Ctrl-C to copy and Ctrl-V to paste elsewhere/etc...

I just read where you apparently have your Windows 7 disk but can't boot off that disk though? ... That's an entirely different problem from anything dealing with your hard drive. You may have to change boot order in your BIOS or might have to press a certain button to boot off DVD.

[who_cares973]

Re: Hard drive crashed -- need advice

You should be able to see everything on your windows partition via ubuntu

[Reincarnate]

Re: Hard drive crashed -- need advice

In Ubuntu, go to System, Administration, Disk Utility. Click on your hard drive in the list. Run the S.M.A.R.T. self-tests on it. If it's coming up with bad sectors, there is some amount of "buffer" room on the drive set aside for that and you're "okay" but really should be thinking about replacing it if that's the case. Beyond that "buffer" though you'll start having more serious problems.

SMART Status: Disk has a few bad sectors (green light).

When I run the test: 1 bad sector.

ERROR ID 197: Current Pending Sector Count: Number of sectors waiting to be remapped. If the sector waiting to be remapped it subsequently written or read successfully, this value is decreased and the sector is not remapped. Read errors on the sector will nto remap the sector, it will only be remapped on a failed write attempt.


wtf?

[Reincarnate]

Re: Hard drive crashed -- need advice

I just read where you apparently have your Windows 7 disk but can't boot off that disk though? ... That's an entirely different problem from anything dealing with your hard drive. You may have to change boot order in your BIOS or might have to press a certain button to boot off DVD.

I can change boot order fine. What I mean is that when I run off the CD, it says "Loading Windows files" or whatever and then goes to this screen with the green loading bar, where it just kinda sits there forever. Same thing it does when I try to use the Repair utility from within the boot procedure sans CD.

[Reincarnate]

Re: Hard drive crashed -- need advice

Trying

sudo touch /forcefsck
sudo reboot
Ok that seemed to check the wrong partition, lol.

[UserNameGoesHere]

Re: Hard drive crashed -- need advice

Do you have a bootable thumb drive? Or a thumb drive you can use? (2GB should be fine).

Put the thumb drive in, then within Ubuntu go System, Administration, Startup Disk Creator and you should be able to make the thumb drive bootable with your version of Ubuntu on that.

Boot off the thumb drive (You may have to enable booting off USB thumb drives in your BIOS or may need to set it higher in the boot order). Once in Ubuntu zero-out your hard drive, stick your Windows 7 install disk in the tray, close that, shutdown Ubuntu, remove the stick, boot 'er up and hopefully Windows 7 will be able to install now (You lose all previous data doing this though)

To zero-out your hard drive from within Ubuntu you'll need to know what device file it is, which unfortunately can vary. The Disk Utility from earlier should tell you what device it is (for example mine is /dev/sda but yours could be /dev/hda /dev/sdb etc...) The number after is the partition so /dev/sda1 would be a partition within /dev/sda.

To zero-out /dev/sda for example (and you need to replace with what it really was) you can run this from a command prompt

sudo su -
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=1M

To zero-out just a single partition instead of the whole drive (for example just sda1 and not all of sda) you could do this instead but replace with the correct drive identifier and partition number.

sudo su -
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda1 bs=1M

-edit-
oh and it will appear to be doing nothing but it's zeroing your drive. It just can take a long time. Hours even. Let it do its thing and trust that it is doing its thing. Unfortunately you get no confirmation until it's done -- and only confirmation is you get to type text in your command prompt again (yay). So it'll seem like it is "hung" but it isn't.

-edit-
back up all data (for example burn to DVDs) before zeroing out your drive though or you potentially lose it forever. Zeroing out the drive is to give Windows 7 a "clean" hard drive to install to. If repair options aren't working, sometimes a full reinstall is the only answer.

-edit-
oh yeah, and once you've zero'd out your drive, run the S.M.A.R.T. tests on it again and see if that one sector got successfully remapped (it should). If not, then I don't know what to tell ya. And you may want to just stick another drive in there and reinstall to it instead.

[fido123]

Re: Hard drive crashed -- need advice

Trying

sudo touch /forcefsck
sudo reboot
Ok that seemed to check the wrong partition, lol.

sudo -i
apt-get install ntfsfix
ln -s /usr/bin/ntfsfix /usr/sbin/fsck.ntfs
ln -s /usr/bin/ntfsfix /usr/sbin/fsck.ntfs-3g
fdisk -l

fdisk should return the appropriate information as to where your Windows partition is mapped out too. It's the only NTFS partition. If for some reason that doesn't work use the blkid command on /dev/sda(1-4) or /dev/sdb etc. You can see all these easily with:

ls /dev/sd*

After you've done all things prior and know which partition is your Windows partition execute:

ntfsfix /dev/sd??

Where '??' is the rest of your partition map.



Also to escape root privileges from 'sudo -i' just execute 'logout'.

[Reincarnate]

Re: Hard drive crashed -- need advice

I'm actually creating a bootable LiveCD as we speak -- it won't let me **** with the main drive since it's in use, so I'm going to try operating outside the drive first.

And no I don't want to lose my data that's already there... trying to repair shit if I can

[Reincarnate]

Re: Hard drive crashed -- need advice

sudo -i
apt-get install ntfsfix
ln -s /usr/bin/ntfsfix /usr/sbin/fsck.ntfs
ln -s /usr/bin/ntfsfix /usr/sbin/fsck.ntfs-3g
fdisk -l

/dev/sda1 is a Hidden NTFS WinRe (start 2048 end 27650047) blocks 13824000
/dev/sda2 (boot * selected here) is a HPFS/NTFS/exFAT (start 27650048 end 27854847) blocks 102400
/dev/sda3 is a HPFS/NTFS/exFAT (start 27854848 end 976771071) blocks 474458112

[fido123]

Re: Hard drive crashed -- need advice

sudo su -

The root account by default is disabled in Ubuntu and Ubuntu variants. The proper command is 'sudo -i'. This goes for anything with sudo installed on it when root is disabled or you just want to avoid logging into root.

Also correct me if I'm wrong but I don't understand how this will help at all. All this will do is destroy his partition table, file-systems, and data. As far as I know it doesn't matter what garbage is on a hardrive, file-systems typically don't give a crap about anything they didn't write themselves.

/dev/sda1 is a Hidden NTFS WinRe (start 2048 end 27650047) blocks 13824000
/dev/sda2 (boot * selected here) is a HPFS/NTFS/exFAT (start 27650048 end 27854847) blocks 102400
/dev/sda3 is a HPFS/NTFS/exFAT (start 27854848 end 976771071) blocks 474458112

How was your partitioning scheme? Is one of those a recovery partition, one of them is where you store your OS, and the other is where you cram all your data so it's not lost in reformats? Anyways now that I look at it it doesn't really matter. /dev/sda2 seems to be your boot partition but I have a feeling that's just Windows Boot Loader. Better be safe than sorry and just run the following command:

ntfsfix /dev/sda1 && echo "sda1" && ntfsfix /dev/sda2 && echo "sda2" && ntfsfix /dev/sda3 && echo "SUCCESS"

That whole thing is one command. Will tell you when it's done each one to give you some piece of mind that it's not frozen or w/e. Overall I'd say /dev/sda3 is your most likely candidate.