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I apologize if this question has been answered previously. I've checked through the "similar titles" but haven't exactly had any luck. I'm aware of the problem and I know the solution, I simply don't know how to implement the solution properly. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

What I'm experiencing is a SMART failure 05 and I'm being warned that a disk failure is imminent. My old partitions is what is causing the problem and the solution is to skip over the bad sectors via a new partition. I have a 100gb hard drive, and I think it's safe to say that the first 20gb are borked in this regard. How do I set up a partition outside of these first 20gb? Would I designate this as "free space"? Or something else? Please be detailed (e.g. screen shots), I'm fairly computer literate but I'm a beginner when it comes to Ubuntu 12.04.

Thank you for your help!

Mike
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  • If SMART says failure is imminent, then you need to not use the drive as it WILL fail soon. – psusi Apr 30 '12 at 13:27

1 Answers1

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As your drive has bad sectors it is likely that the drive will fail in the near future. It is therefore not recommended to further use the drive but replace it with a new one instead. Proceed only if you have not other choice or the drive will not hold any important data. Make sure your regularly back up this drive.

On installation of 12.04 (see this answer for screenshots) you will be asked how to use your disk. Choose Something else on the Installation type menu.

This will open Ubuntu's graphical partition manager from Ubiquity. In case you have already installed Ubuntu you will be able to run Gparted from a alive CD. For editing unused partitions we may install gparted Install gparted.

We assume that your drive does not contain any important data, is unmounted, and is ready to be repartitioned. Choose New Partiton Table to repartition your drive:

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We then need to tell gparted the erroneous sectors assuming they are really at the beginning of the drive by selecting Add... and then choosing don't use the partition:

enter image description here

After that we may create the remaining partitions to hold Ubuntu, namely the Swap partition (in case we really need one):

enter image description here

And then at least the root partition (/) to hold the system files. We may also add a separate /home partition here (but this is not really needed anymore):

enter image description here

After we have set up the partition table we proceed with partitioning, formatting and installing Ubuntu to this drive by pressing Install Now:

enter image description here

Note: In case you are unable to install Ubuntu or get errors when booting it may likely be that additional bas sectors have occured that will make the drive even less usable.

Community
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Takkat
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  • Thank you for your help! I ended up quarentining roughly 90% of my disk but the fix worked. I agree with the commentors in that this is a stop gap measure and not a long term solution, but I finally have a working machine! Thanks again! – Mike May 01 '12 at 11:35
  • The partitioner in the installer is not gparted. – psusi Sep 17 '13 at 01:27
  • @psusi: thanks for the note. I made some edits to better reflect this. – Takkat Sep 17 '13 at 07:12