On 9 October 2011 00:29, Steven D'Aprano <steve@...> wrote:
> Timothy Pearson wrote:
>>>
>>> On Saturday 08 October 2011 19:41:56 Mag. Dr. Nikolaus Klepp wrote:
>>>>
>>>> Well, looks like the harddrive. Get a drive now, your's could fail any
>>>> second.
>>>
>>> I have one on order!
>>>
>>> Lisi
>>>
>>
>> In my experience if the drive is going to die completely it will do so
>> without much warning.  The bad sectors you are experiencing are more like
>> a cancer (dying R/W heads, bad disk surface, one or more head crashes in
>> the past, etc.) and will continue to spread.  The less you use the disk
>> the better, as each write access will likely corrupt more sectors.
>
>
> You said you ran smartctrl which found "some errors", but you didn't say how
> many or how serious. Most hard drives will be expected to develop bad blocks
> over time: they're normally found by the drive and mapped away to never be
> used again.
>
> Have you done an fsck on the file system?
>
> I always install two hard drives in desktops and use software RAID-1 for
> redundancy in case of a failed drive. RAID is not just for servers :)

Well, I installed a new drive (twice the size of the old one, but
small by today's standarsd at 160GB. I then tried to install an OS.

After trying 4 times with Lenny and having it fail each time, and
having major problems with the partitioner, I decided that Lenny as
Old Stable might be OK ot use, but apparently not to install.  So I
tried Squeeze.  Apart from a small glitch over network card drivers
which didn't cause any real problems, I was presented with a system
that the installer reckoned just needed to reboot.

Since when I have had major problems.  X is a mess.  The log-in screen
flashes, flickers and is useless anyway because the mouse and keyboard
are dead.  I had uswed LXDE for teh instalation, so nI relogged in at
teh CLI and installed Trinity, hoping that kdm would be better than
gdm.  It was.  It flickered less than gdm.  But it still didn't allow
me to do anything.

Attempts to install an xorg.conf that I know works with that monitor
and video card nall failed for different reasons.  When I log in at
the CLI I get SOSs from the kernel about missing mod files.

There is obviously more than just the HDD wrong with this machine, and
I still fear the motherboard.  So next I will try the CMOS battery,
and if that doesn't work I shall have to decide what to about/with
that desktop.

I feel that at this stage I am clutching at straws.  Ideas still
welcomed!  I haven't yet reached the stage where I am quite ready to
pension the old girl off.

Lisi