Complete freezes .... Serious problem

An old Seagate Barracuda 7200, great HDD.
In fact, until your HDD doesn’t makes noise that is not mechanical problem, you could also try to determinate the bad sectors on it to see if it’s really important or not, then in reformatting it on low-level, it will escape this space of dead sectors.

My old Hitachi 7200 is in this case, a part of space on this HDD is dead, and I’m using my EndeavourOS on it ! Maybe a new SDD is the easier way to fall down the fear that it would explose soon, but I like old machine that you think dead but still work ! There are surprising sometimes !

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I don’t mind storing unimportant data on that HDD but the fact that it freezes the entire system and sometimes make the system unbootable is a serious issue.

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It gets really interesting when a dead drive keeps you from entering the BIOS :slightly_smiling_face:

Not necessary, it could be only like mine a part of the space disk that is dead which doesn’t mean all your disk is dead ! For example, if you have 50Go space dead on your 160GB you could still use a 110GB. For me, an HDD is really in danger when it’s about mechanical part…
Until this works, you could continue to use it if you are going more in deep about how to repair it via software…

After, I admit there is SDD which is faster and less expensive than before, but for those who don’t have money for it, it’s pity to put GB space in garbage that could still serve…

I understand but the problem is the HDD is not detected during boot & it ends up in “emergency mode”. I did try to repair it using Gparted. It worked for 2-3 boots and after the same thing “emergency mode”.

As I said I am pretty satisfied with the storage my SSD offers. If in future I need more storage I will buy another SSD.

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I see, but you would not get it with GParted. To repair this you need others tools, it asks low level format on your disk to repair physical and logical bad sectors.

I would check today, I think I have an old usb key somewhere with these kind of tools I used few years ago to repair my HDD. I would tell you. It would not kill a rabbit to try it in case you could save GB space for backup…

It will be a good learning experience. I will learn something new but frankly I don’t want to struggle with this anymore. Please don’t take this is a wrong way.

Don’t worry, it’s up to you.

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@Kresimir
It happened again just 10 mins back. Firefox froze & the HDD activity LED was glowing all the time. Since I had enabled Magic SysRq button I was able to recover.
Please give me the commands which are needed to pastebin the logs that you need to troubleshoot.

I checked and found my old usb key that contains a mini debian system repair tools then the app to check your smart HDD is about gsmartcontrol :

sudo pacman -S gsmartcontrol

Then you have the excellent Testdisk by default on EOS to repair sectors partitions that would work on low level…

Or you could use this Live Iso https://gparted.org/livecd.php you would find all the tools for your HDD.

The drive is most likely failing because of the electronics on it as opposed to the errors on the drive itself. You can run a utility on the drive to do a low level format but that most likely would be just temporary. It’s just best to replace it with an SSD which is much faster anyway.

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Remplacement is not necessary always the solution, on my old Hitachi where I escaped the broken part still works for years !! I’m writting from it on EOS…

That’s why is important to know what really is broken before to replace and these tools helps for it…