Flaky hard drive?

[jlr1701]

Hey everybody,

I think I have a flaky hard drive, but not sure how to diagnose it for sure. Linux and Windows have been acting weird recently. Windows spontaneously rebooted on me while it was coming out of hibernation this morning, and in Linux Firefox has been grinding to a halt and downloads have been stalling for no apparent reason. I had trouble installing a weather app this morning. It claimed it couldn't write to the hard drive. I blew it off then, but now I'm starting to wonder if the HD is failing. It's a WD 1 TB hard drive that is about two years old... but it gets used a LOT!

Oh, with LM 9 I originally installed it with EXT4, but it was SLOW and unstable. Got to where I couldn't even burn a CD with it. So I blew that install away and went with EXT3. Seems better, but still flaky. And it's not just Linux. Like I say, Windows 7 is acting odd too.

Any software I could test the drive with or any way to tell what's going on with it?

The only thing I can think of that might be contributing to the weird behavior is some overclocking I have tried. Right now my i7-920 is overclocked to 3.8GHz and seems stable and all temps are well within safety ranges but I dunno... any thoughts?

Thanks,

Jeff

[Aging Technogeek]

Install gnome-disk-utility from Package Manager. This was default in Mint 8, but not in Mint 9. It will check your disk and give you a health report.

[jlr1701]

Install gnome-disk-utility from Package Manager. This was default in Mint 8, but not in Mint 9. It will check your disk and give you a health report.

Thanks! Testing the drive now...

[jlr1701]

It's taking a VERY long time to run the tests, but it is a large 1TB drive. Is that normal or does that indicate a problem?

Thanks,

Jeff

[Aging Technogeek]

The app is checking every one of the 8 terabits on that drive. It has a right to take a long time, its doing a lot of work.