How is my Aspire doing?

phagio

Hello, thank you for opening.

 

I'm experiencing disk failures in the last days, which worries me about the state of the disk and, in general, the notebook itself. I'll tell you the history of my notebook so that you'll get an idea...

 

I bought an Aspire 5750 with Windows 7 in December 2011 and lived happily. In December 2012 I installed Linux Ubuntu in dual boot, and while doing it accidentally erased the Windows partition. I solved the situation by doing a low-level format of the disk and restoring the original system with the restore disks which I burned when I bought the notebook.

The following years, I installed a variety of Linux OS, to the point of having 3 bootable OS in grub, which (I think) led to frequent boot failure (initramfs, for those who know Linux and grub) because of the excessive number of partitions on the disk. Reducing the OS number from 3 to 2 solved the situation.

Last fall, the wireless network card started to fail: I opened the notebook only to find that the card could move a little and, in fact, was not perfectly plugged in. I solved by inserting a little piece of folded paper to hold it still, and it never gave me problems again.

However, some days ago I got another kind of problem, a proper "disk failure", something like "Cannot find readable drives" (I'm sorry I did not write down the actual error). When it happened, the notebook was plugged to AC power supply, with the power cell unplugged. To the notebook was connected a cooling pad. Please notice that this configuration never gave me problems before. By rebooting, the error changed a couple of times, and in the end gave me a sentence like "disk read error."

Plugging in the power cell immediately solved the problem, which also used to happen in the "previous" case of boot failures. After I plugged in the power cell, no error showed up even if I booted using the shown configuration.

 

I'm wondering if the disk is actually getting old (and in case, if I could replace it somehow) or it is a software issue (excessive partitioning?) The current configuration is:

/dev/sda1: 200GB - Windows 7 (boot)

/dev/sda2: extended

____/dev/sda5: 1.91GB - Linux swap

____/dev/sda6: 11.11GB - data (ntfs)

____/dev/sda7: 57.9GB - data (ntfs)

____unallocated 1.41 MB

____/dev/sda8: 126.24GB - Linux boot (ext4)

____/dev/sda9: 200GB - data (ntfs)

____unallocated 2.5MB

 

Any help or opinion will be welcome, I'll give more details if requested.

 

Thank you in advance!

-Justin

phagio,

 

The hard drive could be going bad, it is a couple years old now. The easiest way to test, well maybe not the easiest, but to take a new hard drive and use it in the system to see if it has the same problem. That way at least you'll know if it is the hard drive or maybe the motherboard that is having an issue.