damaged sectors at my harddisk after installing Linux?

[Sternenschwaermer]

Dear colleageus!


Long time since I've been here...


I've got trouble with my harddisk in my Thinkpad T41P. Hitachi Drive Fitness Test told me after the longer fitness test, the shorter didn't find anything, that sectors on my Hitachi harddisk are damaged.
The test program I runned was booted from CD and started a system in text mode where I can run several Harddisk tests.

I installed Suse Linux 10.0 on my Notebook, and then the Trouble begun.
My DFSee (.com), started from CD, detected several errors in the EBR or enhanced boot record.
I couldn't fix it with that rather capable tool, and the comments on the display were running in slow motion over my system, normally it's so fast that I can hardly read anything and have to scroll up and down to read the comments.
Even I I tried to restore my Windows XP image as basic system, the others would have restored or installed after, no start of a system was possible.
Inserting a Windows XP system, entering the command mode, and fixmbr and fixboot didn't change anything, my Image was not startable.
Another restored image was not startable, too.

I restored those images some months earlier without problem and was able to restart Windows XP without problems.

When I contacted Jan van Wijk, the author of DFSee, and an acquaintance which knows a lot more about Linux, the told me that Linux treats the data on harddisks different than other systems and that it could be possible that a drive fitness tool can think data is damaged because of Linux.

Do you have Linux installed on your harddisk? Can you run drive fitness test or did you already made experiences with a situation like that?

Thanks...

Thilo

[PrincipalValiant]

If you have a dual boot with XP and Linux absolutely never try to copy, modify or do anything to data on the NTFS partition while in Linux (regardless of whatever Linux fs you have). It is bound to cause problems, though I'm not sure as serious as damaged sectors.

Funny enough fixmbr and fixboot never fixed any of my problems either.

If you can't boot into XP give this a shot, download the ultimate boot disk or something similar and fdisk /mbr, sorry I'm not familiar with am ebr, but if the linux booloader isn't working, just try reinstalling it. If it was working in the first place, don't bother trying to fix it. Are you saying that the problme was only apparent after you used drive fitness test? Maybe try another utility to confirm any damage.

[tfflivemb2]

You might want to search google for a program called Autoclave. It is an excellent linux based formatting program. Be prepared though, it is VERY slow.

It helped me recover from a bad install of Red Hat 9.0 on a Thinkpad 600E with a 40GB drive, that was a dual boot system with Windows XP.

[carbon_unit]

Go to http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/ and get it.
This will make a bootable CD with many tools on it including autoclave and the Hitachi DFT.
Let it run overnight and in the morning the drive will be clean.
I don't think Linux has ruined your hard drive though. Either it was failing before or something is reporting false positives on the errors.
Regardless the UBCD is a tool worth having.

[tfflivemb2]

Go to http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/ and get it.
This will make a bootable CD with many tools on it including autoclave and the Hitachi DFT.
Let it run overnight and in the morning the drive will be clean.
I don't think Linux has ruined your hard drive though. Either it was failing before or something is reporting false positives on the errors.
Regardless the UBCD is a tool worth having.

THANKS, just bookmarked it!!! I'll have to burn a copy tomorrow. What a great resource.