Hi everyone,

I'm experiencing a few problems with my system. The problems all started when my ATA hard drive died a few months or so ago. I bought a Barracuda 7200.8 400Gb SATA drive to replace it. One partition Linux (250Gb, main), one partition Windows (150Gb, games). After a week or so, the Windows partition went dead. BSOD "unmountable_boot_volume" it said. I didn't really care, because just before that I screwed with the bootscreen. Problem solved, I thought, no need to get my hands dirty on this one, it's just a few files that are corrupted. A reinstall will do it.

So I formatted the partition and reinstalled Windows after another few weeks. Now, today it hanged. I noticed it was a lot slower than my previous Windows installation, but it played games, so I didn't care. I powered it on. Slow drive recognition. Windows BSOD "unmountable_boot_volume". Linux errors: ata3: srst failed (errno=-16). No os at all. Now I'm here, writing this on a slow Pentium IV. I'm suspecting the drive to be bad. Chkdsk didn't detect anything. The hardware hasn't changed a year or so, so that's not the problem. Does anyone have suggestions on how to fix this? I'm about to throw it out the window.

btw: Sorry for any bad language.

Hi there LinuX and welcome from me

Is there any way you can swap out the drive to another PC...at least that way we can discount any other hardware issues on your other PC?

Hello

As for now, I'm working on the pc without the 'bad' hard drive. Booting from a livecd with the drive connected didn't work. I'm currently trying to mount the 'bad' hard drive using an external hard drive enclosure. The command "dmesg | grep sda" outputted "Buffer I/O error on device sda1, logical block xxxxxxxx" and "lost page write due to I/O error on sda1", so I think it's just a bad drive, rather than my whole system.

Wow, yea - another hard drive. Odd one that...

I've not really come across 2 hard drives going wrong in such a short amount of time without there being some other factor influencing it. Silly maybe, but have you tried another SATA cable? Do you have any other external drives attached to the PC?

Other than that..I'm stumped...

Hi

I bought this hard drive on a site something like eBay. The hard drive didn't seem broken, since it worked flawlessly for months. Yes, I have an external hard drive connected, but that's not the problem, since I'm able to switch it off easily. Switching SATA ports to secondary master or another SATA cable didn't work either. Oh, and about the old hard drive that crashed, I'm not really surprised. It was a temporary hard drive and it was very old. I'll just have to buy another hard drive. Thanks anyway.

Can someone mark this thread as solved? Thanks a lot.

Linux,

Could you tell us what you did to resolve this issue? Did you just buy a new hard drive?