Problem with WD drive in laptop

[krzychu (chris)]

Last week my WD2500BJKT-7 broke down in my laptop. SMART shows 1465 bad sectors. I made a clone of the disk and recovered almost all of the files. This was the first time I used ddrescue and I am not sure weather I got all I could from the drive. I am currently abroad and I need this laptop to work until the end of the month. I tried to instal UBUNTU on an external drive attached to this laptop to be able to do some work. Unfortunately the installer doesn't get to partition selection. I believe this is due to the hard disk errors. Is there a way I can make it working? I am interested in a temporary solution. It would be ideal if the solution did not touch the internal hard drive, until I am 100% sure I can not save more data.

Thanks
Chris

[Vulcan]

Some parts of your story are not completely clear to me. If you think that the unreadable parts of the internal disk, are causing problems with the Ubuntu installer for the external disk, then IMHO you may need to remove the internal disk (and then store it safely, in an anti-static bag, protected from external shock). Depending on your laptop, there might be enough room to just disconnect the internal disk drive from its interface connector e.g. move it 1cm - but then you would need to unscrew it and so there is a risk that it will be loose inside the laptop and this would probablt result in other damage, so you need to think about those risks.

Alternatively you might be able to hide the internal disk if your laptop BIOS allows you to totally disable the internal disk controller - however in some cases, the Linux ATA / AHCI driver is still able to detect (and try to scan) controllers which have been incompletely disabled by the BIOS.

[krzychu (chris)]

I should have mentioned it. The laptop is still on warranty (but I left the paper work back home, so I can't give it back until I return home) so I do not want to open it.
I also checked BIOS for the option to disable the internal disk controller. Unfortunately it does not have that option.

To support my suspicion that the hard drive errors are the problem I can say that most of the bad sectors are in the beginning of the disk. (ddrescue took 6 hours to get through the first 10GB and another 10 or so for the rest of the drive). That is the area where the OS lives, and is probably checked by the installer. Luckily for the data . I tried two versions of UBUNTU and they both stop at the same level. What's more I used one of the DVDs on a different PC and had no problems. So it is not the installation process itself.

Do you think that a low level format could help to cover up the bad sectors, and make the hard drive usable at least until the end of the month? If so how do you recommend I should do it?

Thanks
Chris

[Vulcan]

I should have mentioned it. The laptop is still on warranty (but I left the paper work back home, so I can't give it back until I return home) so I do not want to open it.

So therefore you may not solve your problem

Often the screw(s) to the hard disk area are not protected with a warranty seal on the laptops which I have seen, but of course it is your choice about what you do.

I also checked BIOS for the option to disable the internal disk controller. Unfortunately it does not have that option.

Do you think that a low level format could help to cover up the bad sectors, and make the hard drive usable at least until the end of the month?

I cannot predict the future. The answer depends on the real cause of your disk drive's problem, and that diagnosis is impossible to give remotely - there are several possibilities, some of which are more likely (but still not certain).

Also, your story is now very confusing - at the start, you did not want to write anything to the internal disk, until you had more time to run ddrescue to see if more data could be recovered. Now you are talking about erasing everything from the internal disk?! Therefore it is unclear about your real requirements.

FYI, by "low level format" you really mean a zero-fill on modern (S)ATA disks.

I have one suggestion: You might be able to prevent the Ubuntu installer from trying to read the "problem areas" on the internal disk, by just zero-ing the MBR (LBA 0) on the internal disk. After doing that, the disk will appear to be empty to a typical installation program, and I would not expect the installation program to try to read that disk further (although I have no special knowledge about the behaviour of the Ubuntu installer). Before zero-ing the MBR, I would try to make a copy of it into a file first (using dd), although LBA 0 might be one of the unreadable sectors (in that case, try ddrescue, and set the options to just retry reading that one sector).

I cannot predict all the possible problems which could occur during that process, and I am not guaranteeing success, but that would be my basic plan of something to try, if I was in your situation and was being stopped by the Ubuntu installer getting errors when reading the faulty internal disk. Alternatively, why not boot a LiveCD or LiveUSB version of Linux, instead of installing Ubuntu to an external disk (and therefore triggering the problem you have with the installation program). Of course I still expect that you will see errors logged during any attempted automount of the partitions on the internal disk, if there are any disk errors in the relevant sectors, and Linux will run slower from LiveCD/USB than from a hard disk, but it may be another workaround for you.

It's your data, and your laptop, so it's your choice about what you do. Good luck!

[krzychu (chris)]

And again I must have been unclear. I must work on my communications skill. I already have a ddrescue copy (dd did not work) of the drive. I do not plan on using the internal hard drive, so I figured that there could be a method not to hurt the data on it. That was supposed to by my back up in case I being a newbie screwed up and left something behind while making the clone. (hope it clears my situation a little bit.)

If I cannot save the data on the hard drive than I may part with it (I also have most backed up back home). I will try to zero the MBR. If that does not work, than I will zero-fill the rest of the drive. The next stop will be considering to tamper with the insides of the computer. Thanks for your suggestion. I will let you know what worked.

Working from LiveCD has the problem of not enough disk+memory space. To work I have to use big RAM hungry programs :/. Plus you have to start over with your settings after reboot and that is tiring. Already tried that (for example now:))

Hope to post from a new permanent system soon
Chris

[Vulcan]

@krzychu (chris):

Thanks for explaining. I really hope that zeroing just the MBR will be enough for the Ubuntu installer to ignore the rest of the internal disk and allow you to install to an external disk. That way, you keep the internal disk (almost) untouched, but remember that the internal disk may deteriorate due to being powered-on during the next month, and so you cannot rely on it still being readable in the future.

Good luck!

[drc]

What kind of laptop is it? It may be trivial to remove the hard drive, and without voiding the warranty

[Vulcan]

It may be trivial to remove the hard drive, and without voiding the warranty

Indeed, I mentioned that although not using the correct tool might leave telltale marks on the screws.

[northwind]

Marks on the screws shouldn't void warranty in any case, as long as no seals are broken.

[Vulcan]

Marks on the screws shouldn't void warranty in any case, as long as no seals are broken.

Yes, but I know from personal experience that marks on screws are sometimes used to try to claim that the product has been tampered with and hence the warranty is void - in an attempt to avoid their legal obligations. That's why I mentioned it, as it's best to prevent that potential problem, by ensuring that the correct tool is used, and doesn't slip. YMMV

[krzychu (chris)]

Hi guys,

Sorry for the lag, but I am back to work trying to make up the lost week. It turned out that the UBUNTU installation went forward thanks to zeroing the MBR (Many thanks Vulcan). It did not recognise that the internal hard drive had a system on it so it move on.
Unfortunately I could not get the computer to boot from the USB drive. What's more I could not get a good stable eSATA connection (broken cable or sth and no shops open on the weekend to replace it), so I ended up installing the new system on the internal HDD.
The strange thing is, that as soon as I had a system on the HDD, accidentally I booted from a USB drive (forgot that a bootable drive was attached), the same one I tried to boot from before I installed the new system (LiveCD on a USB).


To sum up:
- zeroing the MBR was enough to install UBUNTU on a different drive
- I ended up installing the new system on the old HDD (I keep all my stuff on a different drive, no to loose it in case of another disk fail)
- I should have no problem giving the computer back on warranty due to damage to the screws.

Thanks for your help, I learnt a lot about hard drive the last couple of days.
Chris

PS (Hope the post is clear to the reader )