Did I screw up my hard drive?

[Daniel Veazey]

I was messing around with an old machine, and I tried to install Puppy Linux on it. I got to a point where Puppy Linux tried to install Grub on the hard drive, but the window soon disappeared after appearing to not do anything. Later when I tried to start the machine again (without a Linux CD in the drive), I got a failure to boot, halting machine message. So then I tried to install Ubuntu, and got to the screen that has the progress bar and says it's so-much-percent finished installing. That screen disappears while still at zero, and eventually goes to the desktop. Then a message pops up and says I have run out of disk space. If I take the Ubuntu live CD out, I get the failure to boot, halting machine message again.

So I think maybe Puppy Linux corrupted the boot sector or something when it was trying to install Grub? I don't know. I don't know anything about computers. I know that the hard drive is not defective or anything, because a few minutes before trying to install Puppy Linux, the computer was running fine with its old OS on it.

What I want to do is to get it where I can install Ubuntu on it. Any suggestions?

[Boyd Stephen Smith Jr.]

In <1254900028.3710.7.camel@daniel-laptop>, Daniel Veazey wrote:
>I was messing around with an old machine, and I tried to install Puppy
>Linux on it. I got to a point where Puppy Linux tried to install Grub on
>the hard drive, but the window soon disappeared after appearing to not
>do anything. Later when I tried to start the machine again (without a
>Linux CD in the drive), I got a failure to boot, halting machine
>message. So then I tried to install Ubuntu, and got to the screen that
>has the progress bar and says it's so-much-percent finished installing.
>That screen disappears while still at zero, and eventually goes to the
>desktop. Then a message pops up and says I have run out of disk space.
>If I take the Ubuntu live CD out, I get the failure to boot, halting
>machine message again.
>
>So I think maybe Puppy Linux corrupted the boot sector or something when
>it was trying to install Grub?

Most likely it just hit the MBR. You may just need to "finish" the GRUB
installation, which is possible from the recovery mode of some LiveCDs and
various utility CDs. It is possible that the Puppy Linux installation also
ruined your partition table as well, so you may need to use gparted, parted,
cfdisk, or similar tools as well.

Finally, it is an old machine, so it's possible that the HD itself decided
this would be a good time to "give up the ghost" and fail.

Assuming there's no data on the disk you want to salvage, you should probably
just try to start from scratch:
1. Boot using a CD.
2. Get a command-prompt as root.
3. Determine the name of your HD device; I'll use $hd_device, substitute in
the name of your device.
4. (dd if=/dev/zero of=$hd_device)
5. Wait.
6. If there are any write errors, the disk is bad.

Your HD device is probably listed when you type (ls /dev/[hs]d?) at the root
prompt. For each of those devices, you can use (blockdev --getsize64 $device)
to get its size, which should indicate which one is your hard drive.

HTH.
--
Boyd Stephen Smith Jr. ,= ,-_-. =.
b...@iguanasuicide.net ((_/)o o(\_))
ICQ: 514984 YM/AIM: DaTwinkDaddy `-'(. .)`-'
http://iguanasuicide.net/ \_/

[Rix White]

Just to clarify Stephen's information:

Step 4 in Stephen's instructions will overwrite your hard drive with zeros.  It is a good way to start from scratch with a hard drive, but do not use it unless you intend to wipe out all the data on the drive.

--
Rix White

[Daniel Veazey]

Well, I tried the steps listed in Boyd's message, and yes, I did not want to keep anything from the hard drive. So I tried the dd command and it appeared to be doing something for a few minutes, but after a couple of hours, I got a message popping up on the screen that the terminal window had stopped responding.

On a fluke, I tried installing Windows back on the machine, which formatted the hard drive and installed without any problems. then i tried putting the ubuntu live cd back in and installing from there. I got the same behavior.

I reckon I'll try another distro just to see if one of those installs correctly. Maybe something's wrong with my ubuntu live CD. I'll let you know how it goes.

Daniel

[Daniel Veazey]

Good news. I finally got a Linux distro installed on the old machine, and the hard drive appears to be fine. I don't know why Ubuntu wouldn't install, but I tried openSUSE and it seemed to have some difficulty with my older Nvidia card. Then I tried Crunchbang and it installed fine. I thought I would be taking a gamble on Crunchbang since it's based on Ubuntu, but it worked fine. Thanks for the help, everyone.

On Wed, 2009-10-07 at 12:29 -0500, Rix White wrote: