I have on my hard drive 2 OSes: Ubuntu 12.04 and Windows Vista (I keep it just because of school). Everything was OK on both OSes, but one day on Ubuntu I was getting awkward noises from my notebooks' hard drive and then everything stopped and I couldn't do anything. On Windows everything was OK.
Every time I boot Ubuntu I can get 5 minutes normal run time, without problems. After that the hard drive sounds crazy and nothing works. I could run S.M.A.R.T tests from a older Ubuntu CD (10.04) from the GUI (Disk Utility, or something like that and from terminal). From the GUI, I got that the DISK FAILURE IS IMMINENT and I have ~700 bad blocks (or broken blocks, I had that test I while ago) on my HDD. From the terminal (I don't remember if it was fsck or a SMART test command) I got that the HDD will fail in under 24 hours.
Since then it passed 2-3 weeks. I've tried "badblocks" but after 10 hours it was still running and I had to stop it.
Now I have to use cygwin and other alternatives for my Linux apps on Windows. How can I separate the bad blocks from Ubuntu so it wouldn't use them? Please help.
Best Answer
BACKUP immediately. Your hard drive is failing, consider it done. Don't waste any time or your data may become unrecoverable. There is no way of compensating for that huge amount of failing sectors.