running on a portable version, can i wipe my hdd?

[adanrott]

My original problem is that my laptop is totally F'ed up, freezes at the windows 7loading screen and cant even get in through safe mode (freezes while it says loading files, though no files are loaded yet). so i used another computer to put linux mint on a thumbdrive and am now running off of that. my original plan was to be able to access my hard drive and copy all the stuff i want and foolishly didnt back up off of it onto an external hdd. but when i try to access it, i get an error message - unable to mount location. dbus error org.freedesktop.dbus.error.noreply: did not receive a reply. possible causes include: the remote application did not send a reply, the message bus security policy blocked the reply, the reply timeout expired, or the network connection was broken.

im lost on this, if i can't access my data, is there a way to wipe the drive and install linux instead? on the startup i saw the option to install linux, but didn't want to try it until i knew whether or not i could get my data back.

thanks for at least reading,
-weston

[Kendall]

My original problem is that my laptop is totally F'ed up, freezes at the windows 7loading screen and cant even get in through safe mode (freezes while it says loading files, though no files are loaded yet). so i used another computer to put linux mint on a thumbdrive and am now running off of that. my original plan was to be able to access my hard drive and copy all the stuff i want and foolishly didnt back up off of it onto an external hdd. but when i try to access it, i get an error message - unable to mount location. dbus error org.freedesktop.dbus.error.noreply: did not receive a reply. possible causes include: the remote application did not send a reply, the message bus security policy blocked the reply, the reply timeout expired, or the network connection was broken.

Try mounting the drive with the "Disk Utility" program.

im lost on this, if i can't access my data, is there a way to wipe the drive and install linux instead? on the startup i saw the option to install linux, but didn't want to try it until i knew whether or not i could get my data back.

When you go through the install process you will have the option to wipe the disk.

[adanrott]

alright, i opened the disk utility and had a few different partitions in my main 500gb drive, system@209mb, filesystem@432gb, recovery@65gb, the only one that allowed mounting was the recovery. which the recovery is wierd because i tried using a recovery disk and it said i didnt have a system restore point or any recovery files available...
when i tried to mount the filesystem i got an error

Error mounting: mount exited with exit code 13: ntfs_attr_pread_i: ntfs_pread failed: Input/output error
Failed to read NTFS $Bitmap: Input/output error
NTFS is either inconsistent, or there is a hardware fault, or it's a
SoftRAID/FakeRAID hardware. In the first case run chkdsk /f on Windows
then reboot into Windows twice. The usage of the /f parameter is very
important! If the device is a SoftRAID/FakeRAID then first activate
it and mount a different device under the /dev/mapper/ directory, (e.g.
/dev/mapper/nvidia_eahaabcc1). Please see the 'dmraid' documentation
for more details.

it also said that the hard drive has 11 bad sectors, but i dont know what that means.

[adanrott]

ok so i finally just said w.t.f and installed mint, and formatted the hard drive. booted back up without the thumbdrive only to discover that now it says i have many bad sectors....

under the Reallocated Sector count i have 47 bad sectors and under the current pending sectors there are 14 bad sectors.... how did that happen? it says to backup all data (which i have none now) and replace the disk...the computer is only 4 months old, how could it be that bad??


i just have severely bad luck with computer. i was on facebook just a little bit ago and it froze, waited a while, didnt unfreeze, and i dont know what the the equivalant of ctrl-alt-del is, because that didnt work. so i powered it down and when i restarted not only the the bad sectors increase by 15, but firefox no longer worked, i got an error when i tried to open it, so i shut it down and decided to just re-install it, see if that helps. the installer crashed when it was around 95% complete so right now im workin from my thumbdrive, lost in the sauce. at least that still works....for now.

and for some reason the left-right click on my mousepad doesnt work, i have to tap it to click....wish i had the money to throw it away and buy a new one.

oh and every time i go to youtube.com firefox shuts down haha im not even mad anymore, im just impressed at my ability to complete screw a computer up

[vincent]

From Wikipedia:

Code: Select all

A bad sector is a sector on a computer's disk drive or flash memory that cannot be used due to permanent damage, such as physical damage to the disk surface or failed flash memory transistors. It is usually detected by a disk utility software such as CHKDSK or SCANDISK on Microsoft systems, or badblocks on Unix-like systems. When found, these programs mark the sectors unusable (all file systems contain provision for bad-sector marks) and the operating system skips them in the future.

I've got some bad news for you...you'd better get a new hard drive soon otherwise you'll just keep on getting more and more bad sectors and you'll face a complete hard drive failure sooner or later. I don't think there's actually a way of repairing bad sectors on your HDD; all your computer can do is just mark those sectors as 'bad' and skip/ignore them in the future. Backup your data onto a seperate hard drive before it's too late.