OK picked up a used dell inspiron with a burnt out hard drive... or so I thought.

Worked fine when I ran it with ubuntu boot disc so I figure it must be the hard drive.

Get the new drive, a samsung 160gb 5400rpm 8m pata, I installed the drive, installed linux, worked great for about 36 hours. Other than the fact that the BIOS limited the capacity to 137 GB I had no issues, or so I thought.

Middle of the day today it starts clicking and locks up. I shut it off and let it cool down. Restarted a few minutes ago and click click click...

Is this my fault? What happened? Is the drive shot? Is it some conflict with the computer? Not that there is anything important on the drive yet but can it be repaired?

If it makes a difference the grub loader still starts and trys to get ubuntu going. The opeing screen comes up and it looks like it's loading it just never gets there.

Doesnt seem to want to boot from the CD either now.

OK sorry for all these posts but Im experimenting and trying to get as much info in here as I can.

I removed the new drive and installed the old one.

It tries to boot from CD. right away it says hdd internal soft error f1 to continue f2 to options

I select F1 that was the way to boot the CD before all this happened, and this is the mesdsage I get, Remember I'm trying to boot ubuntu

BusyBox v1.1.3 (Debian1:11.3-5 ubuntu 12) Built in shell (ash)
Enter 'help' for a list of built-in commands.

(initramfs) [ 42.019028] ata1.00: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x0 action
0x2 frozen
[ 42.019085] ata1.00: cmd c8/00:08:00:00:00/00:00:00:00:00/e0 tag 0 dma 4096 in
[ 42.019136] ata1.00: status: { DRDY }
[ 42.398610] ata1.00: revalidation failed (errno=-5)
[ 42.780268] ata1.00: revalidation failed (errno=-5)
[ 42.161146] ata1.00: revalidation failed (errno=-5)

<the rest of the numbers are 43.xxxxxx
followed by
Buffer I/O error on device sda, logical block 0 <5x>
ldm _validate partition_table(): disk read failed
Buffer I/O error on device sda, logical block 0 <5 more x>
ata_id[3601]: main: HDIO_GET_IDENTITY failed for '/dev/.tmp-8-0'

well apparently the 3rd time is the charm.

This time it said internal HDD hard error (as opposed to soft last time) f1 to resume. I resumed and it booted from the boot disc this time. This is with the old drive in. I'm going to try it again with the new drive and see what happens.

tried diagnostics in the "pre-boot system assessment"

everything passed except

"DST short status Test
test results: Fail
error code 1000-0143
msg:unit 0: drive SMART read command failed

it also clicked throughout this test.

...and again it wont boot from the CD with the new drive in.

Looks like you enjoy talking to yourself

I'd get a new drive - current one is not reliable

If it's clicking, it's bad.

_________________
You don't have to backup all of your files, just the ones you want to keep.

Thanks but my ultimate question is this something I'm responsible for or was this just a crap drive to begin with, even though it worked for a day and 1/2?

Did you do something to it other than using it normally?

_________________
You don't have to backup all of your files, just the ones you want to keep.

No, but I've heard recently read something about installing drives larger than 137gb in this computer might result in problems.

This computer isn't capable of reading drives larger than 137gb and I installed a 160. It is a dell inspiron 6000.

Thanks

It can result in problems where the filesystem loses files, but it can't result in the drive clicking. That's a physical problem.

_________________
You don't have to backup all of your files, just the ones you want to keep.

Hi,
You should try to install a new drive, that should make it work again.
A slim chance that the motherboard on your laptop gives overcurrent to the harddrive...but thats less then 0.5%
On the Gb limit you have you should visit Dell's site and do a Bios update...and then use Xp Service pack 2 or newer.

Regards
Bosse

_________________
Rescue IT Datarecovery service Sweden
Rescue IT Dataräddning Göteborg AB
http://www.rescue-it.se

1st thanks again Gurus...



Is there a way to determine if that is the problem before I fry another one? I did after all get this computer with a fried hard drive.



Yeah it's an older computer and it has the latest BIOS update available. I'm using The latest version of Ubuntu with extended support. Later than XP SP2.

Regards
Bosse[/quote]

Is there a way to determine if that is the problem before I fry another one? I did after all get this computer with a fried hard drive.