I tried installing a fresh copy of osx on my old macbook, which failed because of a bad DVD I assume. No big deal I thought, I have two Linux distros on USB that worked before. I ran Gparted to partition and wipe the disk. I used fsck to look for errors and nothing came up. I went to install Puppy Linux on my drive, but it wouldn't write the files. I ran Gparted again but this time, the drive comes up with 4.7Gb of written space, I can't get rid of it. The disk had nothing on it before. I have the same issue if I try to install Ubuntu. So here's what I've tried:

-fdisk to remove partitions and boot record
-gdisk to remove Guid partitions
-gparted to fix the partitions
-booted a dvd with Mac drive utils to fix MBR and zero the disk
-I even went as far as to zero out the drive with dd in Linux twice to no avail, the 4.7Gb is still there!!! The funny part is I can still write files onto the drive, but not install an os.

My theory is when I installed osx with an encrypted hpfs+ and the install failed, it might have fried the drive. Is it repairable, or should I take the drive out and see how far I can throw it?

It sounds like you have a Seagate drive, in which case it has internal problems. Time to throw it away and get a replacement HDD. I would sell your PCB on eBay.

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

It's a mac specific Toshiba sata drive. It was fine a week ago. But I mean if running a low level format on it won't work, then I'm stumped. Is there any other Linux utils other than dd or shred that would rewrite a whole drive?

+1

Sorry, I missed this statement:



Can you show us the Partitions window in DMDE?

https://dmde.com/download.html

Can you show us a SMART report by CrystalDiskInfo?

https://crystalmark.info/en/download/

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

After many attempts to rescue my drive, I did. If anyone has this same issue on their Macbook or a Toshiba sata hdd, try using the shred command in Linux from a live disk or usb.


Example: Open a terminal and type:

shred -fvz /dev/sdx


Instead of "sdx" change the x to the drive you want to erase. This command will force the drive to be overwritten 4 times. After using shred, I was able to overwrite my messed up partition's and bad install. I don't know why I had no luck with using the dd command, but I had success with using shred!

"...should I take the drive out and see how far I can throw it?..."
[que announcer] "...hddrekt receives the snap, stepping back, hddrekt sees wide receiver shred way down field and open, hddrekt throws long! shred catches it! Touchdown! Toshiba wins! " [/cue announcer]

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"Take care of thy backups and thy restores shall take care of thee." Ben Franklin revisited