[ubuntu-uk] Diagnosing Faulty HDD

[Simon Greenwood]

On 29 November 2011 08:58, Jon Reynolds <maillist at jcrdevelopments.com>wrote:

> Hi Folks,
>
> My son claims his hard drive is faulty. He lives remote from me so I
> couldn't look at the symptoms first hand. His diagnoses is basically, that
> when he tried to log in (WinXP) the password would only work if he puts
> caps lock on (?) and when he was logged in, there were many many graphical
> artifacts everywhere, windows opening randomly and generally unusable.
>
> The faulty HDD came from someone performing a scan on the drive and
> reporting that it was 'full or errors'.
>
> Before we go any further, I have the HDD, out of the machine. (I got him
> to bring it with him). This was when I thought it was just faulty, before
> he told me that it did actually log on but behaved badly (I immediately
> thought corrupt or infected software).
>
> But seeing as I now have the drive in my possession, I need to ask advise
> on diagnosing whether the drive is indeed faulty or not. I don't (easily)
> have access to any PCs to put the drive in, so I am hoping I might be able
> to diagnose by putting the drive into an external USB enclosure that I
> have, plugging it into my netbook and going from there...
>
> Can anyone please advise best steps to take (using Ubuntu obviously)?
>
> Much appreciated.
>
>
I've got to agree that it sounds like software level corruption, especially
the problem with logging in. However, there is a command line programme
called ntfsfix which is essentially fdsk for Windows disks which should at
least report errors. You could also use smartctl to look at the disk at the
hardware level.

s/
-- 
Twitter: @sfgreenwood
"post-apocalyptic allen keys"
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-uk/attachments/20111129/6453bace/attachment.html>