O.K., I found a SATA enclosure and ran a smartmontools test. No errors. So it's O.K. and not (at this moment anyway) failing.
It's just weird.
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O.K., that's cool info. I appreciate your input, but the laptop now has a hard drive that works!Originally posted by vinnywright View Post
So assuming that SMART is a good predictor of when a drive is failing, and is more reliable than fsck, and is more reliable than doing an actual write with badblocks, then it's possible that the Seagate may be failing. I guess the puzzlement to me is why I could do an actual install of an old Linux (Vector 7 Light) sandwiched in between failed installs of several different *buntu-based Linux distros, using the same EXT4 format and partitioning scheme for all.
At this point the Seagate is out of the laptop and the WD is working. Since smartmontools requires an actual working Linux environment, I may try to find an external case to connect the Seagate to either the laptop or my desktop and try the tools. Some time!
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you should run a SMART test on the Seagate drive ,,,it sounds like it's failing ,,,,,,
see
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Smartmontools
VINNYLeave a comment:
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Seagate Hard Drive Weirdness
So I recently took over a Toshiba Satellite A135 (yeah, not the greatest specs, but that's not the question). It had been running Windows 7 pretty well. The hard drive as I learned was a Seagate "hybrid" 500 GB unit. I dumped Win 7 and was going to install Linux Mint or some other flavor of Ubuntu - I had several ISOs. So I tried Linux Mint 18.2 Cinnamon first. The install went south quickly, it simply dragged on and when I looked at a terminal it seemed to be throwing a lot of write errors. O.k., so I then tried Kubuntu 16.04.2. MOTS. I tried Lubuntu, then a minimal Ubuntu, and tried to modify the boot line to eliminate starting Ubiquity, and then finally some other small distros I had hanging around. The little ones sort of worked, but pretty much MOTS. I finally tried Vector Linux 7.0 Light.
Older than dirt with a 2.8.-something kernel. It installed, but was a sad user experience.
I ran fsck and even badblocks on the Seagate - everything reported the drive as good. I could write partitions on the Seagate with a GParted CD I had on hand. But could simply not install a distro with a fairly up to date kernel. The Seagate Momentus XT I found out has a strange cache mechanism that sort of resembles an SSD that rides on top of the spinning mechanism. This sounded strange, so I went down the street to Best Buy and bought a plain Jane, vanilla WD 500 GB drive. Then I started all over again with a Lubuntu DVD.
Boom! It installed in (relatively) no time flat, and I runs well (poor laptop specs notwithstanding).
So has anyone else run into this "hybrid" drive mechanism before (Seagate, or any other maker)?
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