Any help before I give up :( hard disk problems

[HardStuffedPotato]

hi guys ,
been playing with mint 14 nadia .. love the stuff but i have issues on my thinkpad t61
i was using 250GB Gskil SSD and started getting read errors ( the drive worked fine with windows for over a year )
thought maybe the drive is going bad ( googled read error etc ) ..installed on new samsumg 320 gb drive and same issues .. started getting read errors
i did google those and seems there might be old issues with this .. now honestly i dont understand a whole lot of hdparams etc but can someone please help me
i would like to figure out if there is really something wrong with the disk or can i tune some parameters

i have installed smartcontrol tools

I installed XP on a smaller partition which works fine

thanx all PLEASE help if you can.


regards
Potato

[viking777]

Firstly, you don't say if the 320Gb disk is SSD as well, if it is then we are probably dealing with an ssd issue - of which I know precisely nothing, but there are a couple of posts on the forum that might help I don't know:
viewtopic.php?f=90&t=101810&p=578163
viewtopic.php?f=90&t=79503#p461796

Otherwise the first thing to try is to open the 'disks' program from the menu, select the correct disk, then click on the cog icon on the top right of the gui. This will open a 'Smart Data' window with the latest 'Smart Attributes' listing many properties of the drive. Any faults listed there? You can start a new self-test from that window as well to get up to the minute information.

Another thing you can do, which might help those more technically minded than me, is to prepare a system report and post it here. Open the 'System Information' program from the menu, click on 'generate report' then narrow it down a bit by expanding 'Computer' and removing 'Boots', 'Display' and 'Users' also uncheck 'Network' and 'Benchmarks' as none of these are relevant. Then click on 'Generate', choose a place to save the results then upload the file to the forum.

[HardStuffedPotato]

Thank you
the other drive is not an ssd
i will boot into linux and generate report and post here in a couple minutes

[HardStuffedPotato]

Here is the sysinfo
thanx again

https://anonfiles.com/file/a8687ec5e797 ... 72f13e8c05


Sorry this is the only way i could upload the file here

[viking777]

Well like I said, that might help those with a firmer grasp on things than I have . I can't see anything wrong with it, but I probably wouldn't see it even if there was.
How about the 'disks' program - anything problems there?

For future reference, the 'System Information' program gives you an option to copy the report to clipboard, if you do that you can paste that into the forum and surround it with code tags to separate it from the rest of the post. The forum is a bit picky about attachment file types, I forgot about that.

[HardStuffedPotato]

no worries
i dont see any errors when i run diagnostics on the disk ..
it just goes to read-only sometimes and everything stops working

thanx again viking

[homerscousin]

Have you thought of trying Mint 13 instead of 14 on your system. If both the SSD and spinny drive create the same errors it's probably something else. I know nothing about a thinkpad.

[viking777]

it just goes to read-only sometimes and everything stops working

That is such a strange error, could you explain it in a bit more detail. What happens exactly? Does it occur when you do something specific? Can you revert back to normal operation? If so how?

I also notice from your system info that your hard disk controller is set to ide mode. This sounds quite reasonable, although by contrast mine is set to ahci mode, maybe you could try changing that setting in the bios and see what happens? Press F2 (or whatever your bios key is) during boot up and have a look in the bios settings. Not all bios's are the same by a long way, but in mine the setting is on the 'Advanced' screen and is labelled 'Ahci Config'. In my case this is enabled, I would guess that in your case it is disabled. Change the setting then save the new settings. If things look worse after this change, just boot back into the bios and revert the setting to its previous mode.

I can't guarantee this will fix anything, but it is something that is easy to try.

[HardStuffedPotato]

@homerscousin .. no i did not will download today

@viking i will try this too

thanx guys .. i really hope to stick to mint , in desperation i downloaded opensuse ..didnt like it

[HardStuffedPotato]

nope ..no luck with 13 also ..
the problem is with linux using ssd somehow
also viking , i did change to ahci in the bios , and windows xp is up and running fine ..
so for now i am just relegated to virtualboxing linux ..sucks big time tho .. as i really wanted to totally switch to linux.

will see about getting another disk and trying once again when i get some time

thanx guys

[homerscousin]

If xp is running fine, it isn't the disk and if both hdd's create the same problem with 2 different Mint distros, to me it's between Linux and that thinkpad. Did you search this forum for 'thinkpad'? You may get lucky and find something unusual. And Linux in virtualbox runs fine?

[HardStuffedPotato]

hey homerscousin
yep ubtun in virtualbox runs fine
and xp runs fine .. so i am sure its got something to do with linux
no big deal .. i truly appreciate you guys helping

regards