Linux Mint destroyed my hard drive?

[freezerburn]

I have only one 750 GB hard drive in my PC that was very important to me. I've never had a bad experience with linux until now and i use it quite a bit. Over the weekend i tried out mint 9 because i like testing distros and i haven't tried it out yet. I set up a 8 GB partition for mint 9 and grub to install on. I believe this partition is corrupt or something now. Everything was working great for awhile until i did updates and then started experiencing problems. Now my computer does not boot, it does not detect my 750 GB hard drive and it does not see the ntfs or linux partitions when booting from a live CD. I can't even back up my windows files now or anything, it's all gone! The drive is visible in the BIOS and it will attempt to load grub from the hard drive but goes extremely slow (hours upon hours). I left it over night and checked it in the morning but it defaults to windows 7 in grub and it was only halfway through the "windows is loading files" screen. I saw some errors when verbose booting a live CD and it says that the device is detected but misclassified. I tried doing fdisk -l but nothing shows up. I tried looking in dev for sda but there's nothing. Gparted shows nothing on the live CD. I've never had any problems with this hard drive in the past and it was working 100% before i installed / updated mint 9. When i tried to boot a live CD with verbose mode i got an error like "ata4: link online but device misclassified, device detection might fail"

[isadora]

Did you hear strange "ticking" sounds on the disk while booting?

Edit: by the way, i do NOT believe an operating system destroys disks.
If that were so, i ate my hat.

[oobetimer]

Restore the partition table using a TestDisk-program.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TestDisk

http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distri ... artedmagic

[freezerburn]

Thanks for the speedy reply, i'll test the TestDisk program when i get the chance. I believe it was the OS to be honest, i heard of other people having similar issues after a kernel upgrade.

[deleted]

Thanks for the speedy reply, i'll test the TestDisk program when i get the chance. I believe it was the OS to be honest, i heard of other people having similar issues after a kernel upgrade.

Can you post the message references [about the kernel issues]? I've never seen an OS do what you're talking about, unless it's been given permission by the user.
-Hinto

[tinca]

freezerburn

You say "Everything was working great for awhile until i did updates and then started experiencing problems." "i heard of other people having similar issues after a kernel upgrade."

How did you you upgrade a kernel?

Best regards Keith

[freezerburn]

I don't know if the kernel was updated or not to be honest, i was just experiencing the same issues as others who had said they experience this after a kernel update. I did run start-up manager to make win 7 default though, and noticed my POST was very slow after that as well. I know nobody wants to admit that their favourite OS can cause harm, but as a linux lover myself i respect it's power, and understand that it can cause damage to systems sometimes when things malfunction.

[freezerburn]

well, it's under warranty... lol..

[OldManHook]

I don't know if the kernel was updated or not to be honest, i was just experiencing the same issues as others who had said they experience this after a kernel update. I did run start-up manager to make win 7 default though, and noticed my POST was very slow after that as well. I know nobody wants to admit that their favourite OS can cause harm, but as a linux lover myself i respect it's power, and understand that it can cause damage to systems sometimes when things malfunction.

Would you please post a link to Others having this problem? Done a Google search,Could not find anything about this, As for favorite OS causing harm,Show me I have been using and repairing Computers for many years Have never seem an OS Kill a HD and since you have Win 7 are you sure that Windows didn't cause the Problem? What can Malfunction in an OS?

This looks like a Hardware Problem--You Didn't say what brand or how old the HD is.

[freezerburn]

It was working 100% perfectly fine before i installed mint i guarantee you that. I had pre-formatted my partitions with GParted on a live CD and also checked my disk afterwards and after windows had to perform a check disk after it detected the partition resize and there were still absolutely 100% ZERO (0) bad sectors and ZERO (0) errors. Call it coincidence if you want but i know what happened. I've spent the last two nights of my free time trying to find if theres some sort of BIOS setting or linux distro that will read my HD but its completely gone, and i can't even rescue any of my important data. My system was experiencing major problems after mint was installed, it started hanging and freezing and it shut down improperly and now my disk is dead. It wasn't something I did, i have been using different flavours of linux for awhile, i can spot problems when they occur and i had zero issues before i installed this OS. Maybe it made my system run hotter than normal and screwed up the bearings when it was locking up in gnome. Maybe the proprietary nvidia driver i installed caused an overheat issue too, since i have never put linux on this desktop (because i knew something like this had the potential to happen). i don't know but i do know that my hard drive is busted, it wont read or detect on any live CD (including, Ubuntu 10.04, supergrubdisk or something like that,Acronis (for linux partitions) and Parted Magic. I had a friend who wanted to try all those options and wouldn't accept the fact that I said no OS will read it because its completely gone. I know that if i didn't install mint i'd still be playing Just Cause 2, Singularity, CNC 4 and all the other great games i'll have to re-install when i get my replacement HD from Seagate. It was fun while it lasted but i don't think i'll be trying out mint ever again.

[OldManHook]

Had many known Problems.Seagate 7200.11
Did you update Mint or Did you do a firmware update from Seagate-SD1A, Which has Killed many Seagate Hard Drives.
You can do a search for your HD and find lots of problems with it on Windows (someone said use a LiveCD to check drive)
Two(2), Three(3) year old hard drives will fail - Thats Hardware
While you know your system, please don't just blame something you don't understand (Linux) for a Hardware Failure.
Do a Google Search for problems for your HD--
Note I stand corrected

[isadora]

Seagate 7200.10 Had many known Problems.
.......................................................................

Exactly, i can tell.

Had two disks broken within two months.
Something wrong with the firmware.
You can find loads of topics through Google.

[randomizer]

7200.11 had the problems, not 7200.10. I have a 7200.10 which is several years old and without flaws other than a bit of noise. A magically vanishing disk was one of the problems that the 7200.11 series is known for.

It's not physically possible for user-installed software to damage a HDD except benchmarks causing excessive wear-and-tear; even this is perfectly normal, it's just an accelerated process. It certainly isn't possible to affect it to the point where it won't be detected by the BIOS. Only the drive firmware has knowledge or even access to the physical structure of the HDD. Everything else goes through well-defined APIs and abstractions (like LBA).

EDIT: Ah, I missed where you said it is visible in the BIOS. It's possible that the partition table is borked, but that shouldn't stop detection of the drive, it would just prevent you correctly detecting the individual partitions.

[isadora]

7200.11 had the problems, not 7200.10. I have a 7200.10 which is several years old and without flaws other than a bit of noise. A magically vanishing disk was one of the problems that the 7200.11 series is known for.

..................................

You are right!

[inktitan]

Try Dariks's Boot and Nuke
http://sourceforge.net/projects/dban/files/

if your stuff is already inaccessible use this to remove any programs(viruses) that mat be present. this will remove everything from your hard drive and you can start fresh. if this doesn't work then you have a hardware issue. By the way Windows does not like sharing with anybody else. Vista would often crash when partitioned and you may have downloaded a corrupted Mint. Happened to me with Salix.

[ezas]

I'm guessing you don't have backups . . .

My instinct tells me you have a failing drive. When it takes massive amount of reads that says failing drive to me.

Good luck

[ezas]

Try Dariks's Boot and Nuke
http://sourceforge.net/projects/dban/files/

if your stuff is already inaccessible use this to remove any programs(viruses) that mat be present. this will remove everything from your hard drive and you can start fresh. if this doesn't work then you have a hardware issue. By the way Windows does not like sharing with anybody else. Vista would often crash when partitioned and you may have downloaded a corrupted Mint. Happened to me with Salix.

WHAT???

Don't install anything until you are sure it's a failing drive. If it's software you can recover data almost no matter what.

Doing a little more thinking it sounds like you might have a corrupted partition table.

Do a search on restoring or repairing the partition table.

Here is one for linux to get you started. This is a STARTING point. Find out other ways to diagnose a drive before you just start blindly following any instructions.


http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Partition/recovering.html

here is another: http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/docs/h ... escue.html

Getting Test Disk sounds like good advice.

[OldManHook]

Boxed Seagate drives came with a disc maybe you could try it to save your data. Still sounds like a failed drive to me.

[willie42]

Boxed Seagate drives came with a disc maybe you could try it to save your data. Still sounds like a failed drive to me.

Now I had a computer about 2 months ago with a Seagate 750 gig that just up and died. This guy was using windows only. Seagates have not done well for me in the past. I don't know if this is helpful or not. Just thought it might be worth mentioning.

[robthehood]

I had the same thing happen after trying out mint a while back. i too read in a few forums that others had the same issue. however, i doubt seriously that any software can damage a harddrive i do believe that it made the harddrive (whether through permissions or authority) unable to be formatted. it took me using many programs to finally find one that could detect it, but i was still unable to initialize it. i originally thought the drive had just died, but after buying a new one and searching online i realized it was probably the o/s. it was pretty new and worked fine until i went to remove mint.