How do you tell if your laptop's harddrive is on the way out?

Asked by bomyne (639

) October 14th, 2012

I’m running Linux Mint 13 and I’ve noticed some unusual behaviour the last couple of days. While X11 runs fine, every time the computer boots it asks me to fix errors on the harddrive. Also, if i switch to tty1, it’ll sometimes be spitting out IO errors by the truckload.

Just now, my / partition became readonly and I had to reboot to get things to work again.

Is this a sign of the harddrive dying? Or could something else be going on?

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4 Answers

also: squeals and screeches, which is what you hear just before the heads crash and wreck the platters.

The hard-drive errors are what I would be worried about. That’s a real good indicator of mis-alignment of the heads, and that can happen for 4–5 reasons.

I’d invest in a new drive with some haste.

elbanditoroso (33577

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