Ubunutu 9.10 - coincidnece??

[Dave McCarty]

After upgrading my wife's laptop (Compaq Presario V5000) to to 9.10 ( a
many hour project due to slower servers.) On the first boot an error
message appeared stating " A hard disk may be failing. One or more hard
disks report health problems. Click the icon to get more information."

THe icon is a hard disk with a yellow triangle with an "!". Running the
mouse over it gives the following message " 40 GB Hard Disk - ATA
HTS5410G9SA00 DISK HAS MANY BAD SECTORS"
Under Sys-Admin there is now a program called Disk Utility. (I don't
remember it from previous versions)

I have not had any reports of any adverse behavior on this machine nor
have I experienced any problems. It is an older (3-4 yrs) laptop and
there could be an issue but the timing seems questionable.

I am going to run some diagnostics on the hard disk any recommendations?

Dave

[R D]

SpinRite 6.0 http://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm can take a very long time to run. 

RD

[Dave McCarty]

I'll give it a try, I ran drive fitness test from Hitachi and the
results were good.
Dave

[Dave McCarty]

I'm reluctant to spend $89 to test a hardrive that I could replace for
less than that. Any other open source/ freeware programs to recommend.

dave

On Fri, 2009-10-30 at 09:31 -0500, R D wrote:

[Eric Wanchic]

You found one of the features I like about Koala. It did that for me
too, but I knew I was having HD problems. Keep readying the report. Each
HD is going to get bad sectors from time to time. The HD itself has a
defined limit. For my seagate it was 100. After it reaches this limit,
then it starts complaining. However, I had 303 bad sectors, and I knew I
has having read/write problems.

For you, I'll assume that your HD says 100 allowable, but maybe you have
20 bad sectors. Nothing you can send in for warranty, but something that
maybe you should be concerned about. You'll have to open up the report
and look through it to find out, that utility will tell you.

Eric