0

I received a laptop that didn't have a charger or OS. It would try booting from the Hard Drive but it would through "Disk read error. Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart. The bios was locked with a password. I used a livecd and CMOSpwd to blank the bios password. When I tried to install ubuntu to the hard drive that came with the laptop it would fail. The install asks me to connect to the internet, I did, then the next screen checks for available space, powersupply, and internet connectivity. There was a green checkmark by the available space and power and internet. I told it to use the entire disk, but when I past that screen, it throws an error

input/output error during write on /dev/sdb

I tried livecd-ing and running the fdisk -l command, nothing. I am currently using a 20GB hard drive in the laptop, so the cd works and so does everything else. I went into the manual partitioning option, I get ZERO errors when setting up the partitions. Manual setup yields the same input/output error.

I know it sounds like a bad drive, but I have a bad drive that I tried using and I can't even get a green check mark by available space. So I am beginning to think that the harddrive is password protected like the BIOS were. How can I know for sure?

jbeckjr
  • 1

1 Answers1

1

Does sound like a bad drive, especially if you can literally hear it making funny noises (hear any?). Input/Output errors are generally fatal errors. You might be able to still read from some of the drive, but it probably won't get any better and will probably get worse. An encrypted drive would still be readable (assuming it's not some odd expensive hardware encryption, then you probably wouldn't be able to read & re-partition it at all).

Partitioning may work ok if the start of the drive still works ok, but no guarantees about the rest of the drive.

Trying to read through the whole disk with a program like testdisk (photorec specifically) may yield some interesting results of leftover files, but if it errors out too much that's another fed flag.

And if you formatted the drive to ext3/4 you could try badblocks (with e2fsck -c or -cc) in case it's only a few bad sectors that could be avoided. More info from man badblocks and man e2fsck :

   -c     This option causes e2fsck to use badblocks(8) program  to  do  a  read-only
          scan  of the device in order to find any bad blocks.  If any bad blocks are
          found, they are added to the bad block inode to  prevent  them  from  being
          allocated  to a file or directory.  If this option is specified twice, then
          the bad block scan will be done using a non-destructive read-write test.
Xen2050
  • 8,705