Unusual hard disk problem!

[emax00]

I have a rather unusual problem with my Toshiba 500GB (7200rpm) hard disk in Lenovo E330 laptop. The detail of hard disk is given below. It has dual boot OS; Windows 7 and Linux.

The problem is that on start/restart, the hard disk head seems to move back with a ssooo...tick sound and after 2 seconds the grub loads without problem.

So far there is no problem with the disk and everything is running fine. I have checked the disk with windows check-disk utility and there is no bad sector yet (at least on NTFS partition) and the Linux also seems to work fine.

ATA device, with non-removable media
Model Number: TOSHIBA MK5061GSY
Firmware Revision: MC102E
Transport: Serial, ATA8-AST, SATA 1.0a, SATA II Extensions, SATA Rev 2.5

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 1 192 1536000 7 HPFS/NTFS
Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/sda2 192 29703 237048832 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda3 29703 59017 235463680 f W95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/sda4 59017 60802 14336000 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda5 29703 44360 117731328 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda6 44361 44372 96358+ 83 Linux
/dev/sda7 44373 59016 117627898+ 8e Linux LVM

Please help get resolve this furious sound which reminds me of a dying disk.

 

[bsprajc]

Seems like the boot area of your drive may be dying... back your data before it gets worse.
Then you may be able to confirm this in linux by trying to read the drive ( dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/null ) while tailing messages in /var/log or by using dmesg...
If you see the driver spitting out I/O error messages, you can be sure your drive is failing...

 

[Dan Mills]

Install the smartmontools to query the disks built in diagnostics.

sudo smartctl --all /dev/sda

will give you a useful dump of what the hard drives built in diagnostics think about things.

I however suspect that bsprajc is correct and that the disk is on the way out.

Regards, Dan.

 

[emax00]

By the way, there was no such problem with Windows 7 only and it started after Linux installation (dual boot) and installing grub on MBR.
The laptop is relatively new and it seems to be some other reason.

 

[flanello]

If you want to check your whole disk for bad blocks of the hdd you can do this with badblocks from linux.
If your hard disk is fine you could try to reinstall linux.

 

[pjmelect]

You should check the SMART data for your drive, any problem with it will be shown. There are many Windows programs available to show any problems with the SMART data. If the SMART data is all good then you probably have a software problem.