HDD Failure or Virus?

My old man's laptop. In his 80's and his only real interest now. I'm often having to look at it as he'll have been on this or that dubious site and probably clicks on the first "Debbie lives 3 miles from you, wanna ****?  :lol:  I frequently have to block various Nigerian princesses trying to contact him on Skype too!

Tonight he contacts me to say that a window is coming up suggesting hard disc failure. My immediate thought was it's a virus but I've run HD Tune and thing maybe there is an imminent hardware failure coming up. Any ideas? The window that appears when you start the pc overlaid on the HD Tune screen:

can you take the drive out?

oh, ignore that, run a live Ubuntu session,

check your drive that way,

CTRL+ALT+T

steptoe said:

can you take the drive out?

oh, ignore that, run a live Ubuntu session,

check your drive that way,

CTRL+ALT+T

fsck

Click to expand...

 Cheers. Will do. Will post the result. 

might be worth a defrag?

Gave up with Hirens Boot CD under Windoze and stuck an Ubuntu disc in. "Disk Utility / Hard Disc Problems Detected" window came up immediately so I chose to examine:



So appears the HDD is on it's way out?

Thinking cheap SSD in it and give it back to him. Good chance it'll outlast hum tbh.

Is there an option to scan the disk surface?

My thinking, is it a general read problem, or is there one part of the disk surface that's a problem that could be marked as  bad sectors?

This is the other "error":

So that's 1 sector that has had a write failure. Can a disck scan not map that as a bad sector?

ProDave said:

So that's 1 sector that has had a write failure. Can a disck scan not map that as a bad sector?

Click to expand...

Cheers for the pointer. Not sure how I would do that within Ubuntu tbh? Trying this:

http://askubuntu.com/questions/291570/mark-bad-sectors-on-hard-drive-without-formating/490549#490549

I ran:

sudo smartctl --all / dev/sda

Saying the drive is likely to fail in 24hrs:



How btw do I get the Windows 7 Product Key off of the laptop - it's mostly rubbed off of the label on the bottom!

Sounds like a good plan is set up the disk in a caddy with another empty disk and take a copy. Don't run it up again until you can do that.  Then you can look at the coppied data to recover your user files, find your product key etc.

It all depends what he does with the computer and how much data he has? When the HDD in our old laptop died, i couldn't face the battle of getting a copy of windoze to install so put a new HD in and installed ubuntu.

I've downloaded all his photos and documents to an external USB earlier so that's one thing done.

I don't think I could face getting him onto Linux in any form, I can just hear him whinging now!

It'll be a cheap SSD and the genuine copy of Win 7 Home Premium 32-bit I have here but with his Product Key. I reckon I've deciphered all but 3 or 4 characters and they're only "is it a "P" or an "R" etc.

Not the cheapest maybe but easiest & quickest for me to get:

http://www.currys.co.uk/gbuk/computing-accessories/components-upgrades/internal-data-storage/samsung-850-evo-2-5-internal-ssd-250-gb-10116610-pdt.html?gclid=CNXtoo_upc0CFckV0wodXQMJAQ&srcid=198&cmpid=ppc~gg~~~Exact&mctag=gg_goog_7904&s_kwcid=AL!3391!3!74833768219!!!g!110897150420!&ef_id=V0mcqAAAAR3JZFUm:20160613203919:s

Ta, is that Produkey legit or something laden with Spyware?

Canoeboy said:

Dot know, but if you run it on the win knackered hdd then it wont matter, just get the keys

Guide here

http://superuser.com/questions/636568/how-do-i-retrieve-a-product-key-from-another-hard-drive

Looking at this - it should be in as its on Hirens Boot CD

https://www.raymond.cc/blog/easiest-way-to-recover-xp-and-vista-product-key-from-dead-or-unbootable-windows/

Click to expand...

Cheers. Takes some getting used to the "DOS" environment of that Hirens CD tbh. Ordered a 250GB Samsung SSD for £70. Collecting tonight.

are SSDs more reliable than HDDs?

Yes & no!

make your mind up 

My understanding of SSD's is that there are no moving parts, that they're just in effect a big "memory stick". All I know is that they giver older pc's a new lease of life especially when coupled with a Linux install. Boot up and shut down times are much, much faster too.

Let's not forget the hybrid drives out there. A relatively small capacity SSD with say your OS & some programs on then a "normal" mechanical HDD where your data is stored. All in one unit. So you get fast boot times from the SSD with a chance to access / recover data.

I'm going to set up my old man a Dropbox for his documents & photos. 

We tend to use SSD's to run operating systems for PC's designed to run SCADA applications. Then fit a secondary HDD to be used for data logging and trends. 

Over the past couple of years I've found the life span of even high end SSD's to be no where near as good when constantly being written to. An as Canoeboy mentions, they very rarely give you any warning before failure. 

However for a domestic use laptop, fitting an SSD is a comparatively cheap way of improving overall system speed up and will give many older laptops/PC's a new lease of life.