Fantastic Forum the Original Art Bell's Midnight in the Desert and Coast to Coast AM Forum

No great loss if i had to dump all the tv shows and start over..wife said to only try to save Grimm..

lotta errors..

If the disk is failing formatting it is a bad idea, it does a lot of writes and so on.

You should open "disk utility" in ubuntu, you can search for palimpsest I believe it is called. Click your drive on the left and then choose to view SMART data. Look for sector allocation errors, any errors. This will tell you if the disk is dying.

I only skimmed through the thread, sorry I was late seeing this. Just for the future, I don't get thread notifications unless I post in a thread so give me aheads up email at [email protected] if there is something I should see.

Let me know if you work stuff out properly, you can also chat me if I am online. I may not be too much tomorrow but will check email.

Remember that Spinrite actually can help a disk...

Maybe try running a LiveCD like Knoppix and see if you can get to your HD.

Are you sure it's not a PICNIC?

I got it, finally. Windows Media Center and all. But now the system and the TV storage drive are the same and I now have noticeable slow downs. But seems to work fine.

My last attempt at using the original system disk seem great. I had let Ubuntu Drive Utility that Fan mention check it and it said it was good, same as Windows' chkdsk and 2 other hard dish utils, including spinrite on recovery mode. I think the missed detection of a bad drive by so many may be poor SMART support - I saw only 2-3 SMART criteria that were checked and those were good.

I find it odd that this WD Caviar Blue 320GB drive tested fine, installed the media fine and I got all my data from it with absolutely no problems and would even run windows in safe mode fine as that's where I was able to read the logs. And even when spinrite was scanning it only got to 35C. It only went south after downloading all the windows updates. I have all of those installed on this drive with no issues and they were on the other one before it quit, also. I left off one, for my tuner card - could have been the culprit, maybe..?

I don't think the drive is complete trash, but a hinky hdd is not what you want in a system you need - or any for that matter.

I'll put it back in and try the program Fan suggested above but this will do for now. . Will PVR the wife's shows just fine this way.

Thanks for all the suggestions.

Windows by no means has efficient disk management skills. I always use Fix it Utilities by Avanquest.

As a side note, it's always a good idea to have a Linux LiveCD handy even for troubleshooting Linux issues. At least it's always been my experience over the last decade or so.

Just my humble onion.....

But hey what do I know. I'm old school Linux. None of this click, install and run. Tarballs and gZip. Learned with command line and have let my computer skillz really slack off over the years.

megman wrote: But hey what do I know. I'm old school Linux. None of this click, install and run. Tarballs and gZip. Learned with command line and have let my computer skillz really slack off over the years.

Many distros such as slackware, gentoo and (sort-of) Arch still do things this way, and on any modern distro you can still install stuff that way. This is the beauty of a stable platform, things don't get taken out that work.

I still have a disk around here for UNIX and RHSL also. Only way it works, but I haven't touched it for so long it's almost Greek now.

megman wrote: Maybe try running a LiveCD like Knoppix and see if you can get to your HD.

Oh, I got linux - most come live.

I'm downloading ubu 13.xx now so I can kill two birds with one stone:

1. Fix grub so I again have a linux option when I boot
2. Upgrade from ubu 12 lts.

My linux store (I have other disks and usb drives here and there)- most are ubuntu but there's Suse, Knoppix, Slacker, Mint, Puppy, Red Hat, PCLinuxOS...:

Ahoy, Dale, megman, Fan, SquidInk! How have you been?

I see you're talking about Linux. I haven't touched it for quite some time. I loved it when I did but have grown used to Windows 7 at home and work.

Hiya TAB! Welcome home.

I need a better internet connection. maybe online. but I have no land line phone. this is how bad it is FF is the only site I can get on without waiting an hour to load up. I really need help on this. cant even get Art radio show. wont download at all. I have virgin mobile right now and it sucks. nothing in my area except cable. cant get att. they say there's nothing open. so if anyone has any ideas PLEASE! help.