Anders Norrbring wrote:
can't read the partition table, so perhaps the drive is beyond life itself, I'll try another.
You can boot to a rescue system, and run this: badblocks -svnb 512 /dev/hda This will perform a non-destructive read/write test with random data on the drive, one sector at a time. If there is anything wrong with the MBR or partition table, you should see IO errors in the first 63 sectors of the drive. Also run the same command, specifying /dev/hda2 (your root partition) as the target device, to see if there are any defects in it. When performing the tests, you should ensure as few other tasks as possible are using system resources. If you want a very rigorous test of the drive, you can also specify "-t 0xaa -t 0x55 -t 0xff -t 0x00" on the command line. That will perform the test 4 times, once for each of these test patterns. Using all of these test patterns is supposed to be the only really sure way of finding marginal sectors (or so I have been told), but be warned that, on a very large drive, just running the test once will take quite some time. Ctrl-C whenever you tire of letting it run :) If you want a written record of any bad sectors found, use the "-o output-file" option.