How bad is 23?

[maxximilian]

Hiya

Running Karmic Koala and had some trouble booting. Kept hanging at GRUB. Repeatedly tried to restart and eventually got going after killing the power and letting it sit for a few minutes. Upon boot....it was slow and I get a message about bad sectors. I know there are bad sectors....this box was windows XP before it was Ubuntu, and windows was already telling me bad sectors.

Anyway....Ubuntu says 23 bad sectors, which is a hell of a lot more than windows was telling me a few weeks ago and more than what Ubuntu said when it was first installed. So.....how bad is 23 bad sectors?

[Train]

Time to purchase a new one.

23 is not to bad, but tomorrow that maybe 23,000 or worse.

Did you DBAN , Zero fill the drive before installing Karmic Koala.

I have had that work a few times where the disk did not have physical damage.

[maxximilian]

I didn't do anything before installing Ubuntu. I figured it would just ignore any bad sectors. There was only a couple then. The drive is about 7 years old and ran all day....everyday. I figured it was likely on the way out, which is why I thought I would try Ubuntu....just for fun. When it failed completely, I would buy a new one and decide to either re-install the XP (and put up with MS phone calls)....or put the Ubuntu back on. There is no data on the machine worth saving while I wait for complete failure. I was curious how much time it had left. Ubuntu is saying, in big red letters, DISK FAILURE IS IMMINENT, but don't know if it is just being paranoid. 23 didn't seem all that bad to me, but as you say, it could be worse tomorrow.

[maxximilian]

Up to 74 bad sectors now.....just 24 hours later.

Picked up a new hard drive today that is way larger than I needed.....so maybe if Uncle Bill gives me his permission, I will install my winXP for a fourth time and also reinstall Ubuntu for a dual-boot system. The Linux stuff is neat to mess with and ideal for web-surfing, but I miss all my windows programs and games.

[Train]

Sonds good.

I used a bootable linux cd for a while, but that has been a couple years ago now.

Liked it, but somethings I needed just could not be done.

[Dodge]

Hey ya Max and Train.

I'd like to recomend you trying Linux Mint 8. They have a main edition which is Gnome, then x64 which is gnome, then Mint 8 kde which is KDE ofcoarse.

I have the gnome 64bit right now and it is awsome. Other than the games it pretty much has everything you need right out of the box. Even for Major video editing, photo editing, etc. Major 3d rendering proggies etc.

[SpywareDr]

Out of curiosity ...

Download, install and run "SIW" (System Information for Windows) by Gabriel Topala, (the "Freeware Version"):

http://www.gtopala.com/siw-download.html

Under "Hardware" > "Storage Devices" > "Disk n" > "SMART Support", (where "n" = the number of the drive with the problem), what are the "Raw Data" values for the "Reallocated Sector Count (05)" and "Current pending sector count (C5)"?

[maxximilian]

This was an older thread. I have since installed a new drive with dual boot XP and Ubuntu. Both working fine for several weeks now...

[SpywareDr]

Oops. Good to hear you're up and running.