HDD Controller Failure ??

[Soo-Hyun Choi]

Hi,

I recently did 'sudo apt-get update' and 'sudo apt-get dist-upgrade',
and it showed me upgrading 'firefox' and 'openoffice'.

I'm using Hoary 5.04.

After this, both firefox and openoffice got segmentation fault such
that I cann't execute these programmes. As I don't have any important
data in it, I decideded to format the HDD and reinstall Hoary from the
scratch.

But, Hoary cann't partition my HDD nor format it. So I used another OS
(for example, FreeBSD and Windows XP) to format my HDD to test. But
both failed again.

The system hang when Hoary try to format the HDD, and there comes an
error message that your HDD is not formattable when I use Windows XP
to format.

I had an experience that the HDD in my PC had failed - SMART disk
failure. So I had to change it to a new one a few weeks ago. This is
okay as we could observe the SMART HDD disk failure sometimes.

What I now strongly suspect is whether there is a HDD controller-thing
in a PC. If there is one how can I test it whether it is working fine
or not?

Thank you for reading this long question.
Soo-Hyun