Ubuntu – How to fix a possibly corrupted hard drive and install Ubuntu onto it

hard drive

Forgive me if this post does not contain specific details on this technical problem. This happened a few days ago, and I can't remember every minute detail. Hopefully what is described here is enough for someone to help me solve this problem.

Recently, I've been having problems with my computer. One day I was downloading a file from a possibly questionable website when my computer locked up. My only option was to power off my computer by holding in the power button. Come to find out when I started my laptop again I was faced with a black screen. After a few minutes that black screen turned to blue with an error message. It was not a “BIOS blue”, i.e. “blue screen of death,” but it looked a lot like the the graphics of the Windows OS. The error read something like “system 32 folder corrupted.” Now, I'm not one of those computer wizards, but I know enough to tell that is not a good sign. I'm only left to assume that I got a virus, or maybe I just screwed it up with a hard rest. I don't know.

So, after all this I just decided to install Ubuntu onto the hard drive instead. This is because I don't have a Windows disk. My computer came with Windows pre-installed.

I took a USB drive and made it able to boot into Ubuntu. When I booted to Ubuntu for the first time I could see the hard drive broken into four partitions on the Launcher side bar. Each partition had a unique name. The names were something along the lines of OS, Repair, Restore, and something else. I then ran GParted to delete each partition and reformat the hard drive. I think that when I did this I messed something up because when I tried to run the installer I couldn't install it properly. Now every time I boot Ubuntu the hard drive no longer shows up in the Launcher or GParted. I think that this is because it became even more corrupted when I deleted all the partitions.

I'm not sure what to do at this point. Is there something I can do to fix my hard drive? Is there any software that I can install that can access my hard drive and let me reformat it? Is my hard drive too corrupted to fix? Maybe it's physically damaged?

Any advice?

Edit 1:

Since I did a poor job explaining, here is a picture that shows what exactly I am seeing. As you can see I can only see my USB drive from GParted.

Edit 2:

I still have yet to find the answer to my question. I think that it is clear that Ubuntu can not recognize the hard drive. If anyone has any applications that I can use that are already on the OS or that can be downloaded so I can fix my hard drive I would be very grateful. Unless of course there is a better way to fix it.

Edit 3:

I discovered a command for Linux called "fsck". Does this ring a bell to anyone? Can this be used to check the current state of my hard drive? Anyone? Please. Help…

Edit 4:

I am grateful for all the answers I've received thus far, but I've realized something.

When asking this question I tried to give as much information as possible. I was afraid that if I did not I would get ignored. This has seemed to distract people from the actual question. I should have asked about hard drive corruption and left out installing Ubuntu all together.

I have learned a lesson in that it's about asking the right question and not about giving as much information as possible. Making the question more direct consequently makes the answers more direct as well. This was my mistake. I'm going to reform my question to make it more precise. Hopefully I can soon find the right solution.

Best Answer

I doubt that there's hardware corruption. What's happened is that because you've deleted all the partitions, there is no partition to mount. A partition is kind of like a virtual drive. It is the interface to the actual ones and zeros, and provides some structure. It's like you need a body on a car chassis.

So just go ahead and run the installer and select the "Wipe everything and install Ubuntu" option (or equivalent wording). It should take care of everything for you. Keep in mind, since you already deleted Windows, you've got nothing to lose by experimenting. So use this oportunity to have fun and learn something. Or just go listen to some heavy metal. Or go eat a sandwich, see if I care.

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Ubuntu – How to fix a corrupted harddrive after failed upgrade

Well, I'm not sure what exactly I did to fix it, so I'll just list a bunch of things I did that might have fixed it. First off, I was using a 4 gig thumbdrive to boot Ubuntu 12.10 to work with. I had limited space on the drive and could only install new utilities by uninstalling others (like Thunderbird). One utility I came accross was called fixparts. I don't believe that there is a ppa with fixparts in it, so I had to download the .deb and install it with Ubuntu software center. The online documentation/tutorial recommends using fdisk to first backup the MBR data so that if fixparts further corrupts it, it can be restored. I did so (assume the drive we want to fix is sda) with

sudo fdisk -d /dev/sda > parts.txt

and to restore the data

sudo fdisk -f /dev/sda < parts.txt

To use fixparts you just need to provide it with the drive you want to work on

sudo fixparts /dev/sda

From there you can use the interface. It will first tell you the primary partitions it found. It will not list the Extended partitions. You can then issue commands on what you want to do. If you want a list of commands, just use ? See online documention in above links for more details. Fixparts didn't exactly fix things for me, but it got me started. I restored the original Partition Table using the before mentioned command with fdisk and then used fdisk to make my Linux partition bootable. Simply launching fdisk without arguments, or with the drive after it, will allow you to use an interface similar to fixparts. So I ran

sudo fdisk /dev/sda

and set the 2nd partition to bootable. When I booted, I was able to run Ubuntu 13.04 like normal and access all my partitions.

If someone understands the technical reasons for why this fixed things, please feel free to rewrite this mess of an answer and I will select it as best answer.

Ubuntu – How to fix this hard drive

Maybe the "Micca Spect media player" you mention did some formatting of the HD on it's own, I'm not sure if you were trying to use the HD with the player already. And does "The installation went well and I booted into Ubuntu (14.04 LTS with full drive and home folder encryption)" refer to anything that was done to the HD in question?

I wouldn't use Disks (gnome-disk-utility) for any serious partitioning, it lists the Partitioning as "Unknown ()" for /dev/sdb, and there shouldn't be a 2nd entry for a regular HD - it doesn't even list a device either. Maybe it doesn't know about or has bugs with GPT partitioning, which I'm suspecting is the problem, especially given your error "... without being partitioned." But your error messages mention parted, could still be Disks' problem though.

Try gparted instead, it's a nice reliable gui for parted, and knows about GPT partitioning. May need to write a new Partition table too, then partition/format.

And could run sudo parted -l to see partition info about all your devices. (For fun, sudo fdisk -l would show similar info, but it doesn't know about GPT).

I would also consider the possibility that the HD enclosure you're using is doing something funny, or the USB cable, hub, ports, etc... taking the HD out of the enclosure & plugging the HD directly into a computer is a backup plan.

Searching for the "Error: /dev/sdb: unrecognised disk label (udisks-error-quark, 0)" message gets a few results where the HD is failing too...

Best Answer

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Ubuntu – How to fix a corrupted harddrive after failed upgrade

Ubuntu – How to fix this hard drive

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