Serious disk problem [solved - or at least fixed, I think]

[R Kimber]

On Thu, 13 Nov 2014 15:57:26 -0500
Gene Heskett wrote:

> Drive makers, are relatively famous for shipping "commodity" drives with 
> old firmware in them.  Go to the makers site where usually you can find 
> and download a cd iso image, burn it, reboot to it, and with its
> prompting after it has scanned the attached drives, put the latest
> firmware for that drive in it.  That fixed up 99% of such problems I was
> having back when 1T drives were the current commodity drive.

Thanks.  I tried that but the updater said "drive update not needed".  I
also did a memtest, as suggested by agent_m, but the memory was OK. There
doesn't seem to be an option in the BIOS to turn on SMART. Before
investigating that further I decided to upgrade to 14.10 on the ground that
a new kernel might provide the solution. And indeed that seems to have been
the answer.  The drive is working fine now (so far).  So either it was a
Ubuntu (probably kernel) problem, or a key system file somewhere had become
corrupted.

The experience just reinforces my long held view that most problems are
software-related.  I guess I'll now have to plug in the original 'failed'
drive to see if that works.

- Richard.
-- 
Richard Kimber