First, Hi! and Merry Christmass!!! i'm happy to have found you guys.

My system is Asus M50SA-AK037 notebook, 3 years old.
It all started when trying to burn a blank cd. The Matshita dvd its been giving me headaches for a while; it reads dvds but wont read cds all the time. Anyway, trying to burn a cd with nero on win7 - system freeze. I turned it off manually (shutdown button). Then win7 wont boot; passes the logo screen only to give me a black screen with movable cursor. Tried to repair it, last known good configuration, recovery console, and system restore, nothing worked. I tried to clean install... tens of times. Most of the times it would freeze during 'expanding files' step. Same with ubuntu 11.10 - freeze/hangup during install.

After tens of atempts to install several OSs i see it takes longer than usual to POST. I remove the hdd and the problem is gone. Even with a live linux cd and hdd atached it wont boot. But if I remove the hdd and boot from my live pendrive everything is fine - normal speed.


What i tried:

First of all BIOS detects the hdd... slowly but no problem reported.
I tried Seatools from Seagate. Leaving it overnight the Seatools for Dos found thousands of bad sectors after checking only about 5 gb. I canceled it. I tried hdd regenerator too with the same results, and other hdd recovery tools. Now I cant do anything with the hdd attached. Every tool I run freezes the system for hours.
Another thing that I tried: I did boot from my ubuntu live flash, then connected the hdd, the system detects it, but when i try to mount it or mount a partition the command (in the terminal) is running with no result.
If only a couple of megs i could salvage that would be swell.

Planning to do:
Connect another hdd to my notebook to check everything else is fine
Connect my hdd to another notebook and try to install something see how it goes

If it proves that the hdd is the cause of it all 100% maybe try to open the damn thing and see if the head isn't bad positioned like this dude did http://dreadbob.blogspot.com/2011/05/ho ... -hard.html

Waiting for your suggestions,
Thank You!
JR

Does the drive buzz? Have to listen carefully to it.

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Hard Disk Drive (HDD), Solid State Drive (SSD, SATA, NVMe, etc), USB Flash Drive and RAID Data Recovery Specialist in Massachusetts

I can barely hear it. If I glue my ear to it i hear a faint sound of [click-click] pause 2sec [click-click]......

Although I don't recommend you attempt to solve the problem as a little mistake can kill the drive, it is possible that you have bad heads solely based on the fact you said it clicks. If it was buzzing, then the issue could have been what was described in that link.

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Hard Disk Drive (HDD), Solid State Drive (SSD, SATA, NVMe, etc), USB Flash Drive and RAID Data Recovery Specialist in Massachusetts

OK

Here's what I did: I have connected the drive after booting from my ubuntu pendrive; then I force mounted a partition like this:

sudo mkdir /media/HDD
sudo mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/sdb5 /media/HDD -o force

All the files are there, I can copy anything but its hella slow. At the moment im still not 100% its a drive issue. Can it be an I/O problem?

That clicking cannot be caused by an I/O (i.e. SATA) problem. IMHO it's either an internal drive problem (likely, as labtech told you), or a power problem (much less likely inside a laptop, than if a drive is being used externally).

I would definitely not follow the procedure suggested in that link you gave, but if you want to take the risk of potentially destroying your data, then of course you can try anything you want to do.

Thank You for your reply.

As i said in my above post I can access the data, not even one file is corrupt but the reading speed is very slow. Took me all day to copy a 200 MB file.

At this point what can i do if i dont care about the data? Low level format? (dont even know what that is, never did it only heard about it)

This is typical behaviour for some types of drive fault - further degradation / failure could occur at any time.


IMHO you'll be wasting your time, as I wouldn't trust a drive in this state, no matter what you do to try to temporarily extend its limited life.